*sigh* Teaching American history to Americans again. Is there anything that Americans do learn in school?;)
The Versailles Treaty (which ended WWI) involved all parties, including the United States. It insisted on reparations being paid from Germany to France. It also established the Weimar Republic (a democratic government to replace King Wilhelm) and the League of Nations (a precursor to the UN). In protest of the reparation payments, the German government printed all the required bank notes from their treasury, thus causing massive hyperinflation. This happened in the early to late '20s. Hitler staged his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, and spent 9 months in jail, when he wrote Mein Kampf. In 1925, the Americans attempted to combat the weak German economy with the Dawson plan, which actually stabilized the economy somewhat. Had the stock market crash of 1929 not happened, it is likely that the Dawson plan would have restored normalcy to Europe and prevented a major economic factor leading to WWII.
However, the stock market crash led to increased radical thinking, and launched Hitler on his way to the Chancellory. The Versailles Treaty definitely set some important background leading up to WWII, but I'd say that the length of time between the end of WWI and WWII is too long to claim it as the only cause. Read some more; there's plenty of interesting theories about the rise of the Third Reich and WWII.
IMO, if we're to go out and be the world's police, the world should pay us back (and more than just buying our Gov't bonds).
Of course, that's assuming the world wants the Americans to be the world's police. I would endure the most chaotic and bloody anarchy to avoid having the American police having any power over me. Let's see DMCA, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay... Yes, those are the results of an enlightened and fair legal system -- NOT! I'm not even going to offer to let you pay me to be my police. At this point in time, the American idea of justice has cost me more money than I'd care to count. Keep your policemen, we sure as hell don't need 'em.
I assume you have to hide things from debuggers and not keep keys clean in one memory location, etc... Bwahahahaha! Typical non-debugger user. There's no such thing as "hiding something from a debugger", especially not the debuggers we're talking about here. Unless you're on an OS which doesn't let you set the processor's trace flag (why on Earth would you buy such worthless crap?), you will be able to debug, admittedly at a machine language level, but some people can and do read Intel machine code. So fine, keep the bits in a dozen different memory locations. Don't copy the entire key to the HD-DVD device at one go. Use all of the black magic you mention, and it's still possible to reverse the entire process. Obscurity != Security. The only solution is a legal one: make debugging illegal. Hopefully they don't grandfather that law in, or I'll have one hell of a criminal record...
The summary is already stupid. "I like Linux, but it may not work with my laptop, so I don't really want to risk it.", thus reducing x86 laptop solutions to either Vista or OSX, and inviting the loaded question. It sounds like our guy already knows what he wants the answer to be, and is just looking for some justifications to help him feel that he made the right choice.
Relax, OSX is nice. It'll probably have a bunch of DRM crap, too. Does it really matter to you? It's not like DRM is an issue for you since you discount Linux out-of-hand.
Your math would be correct assuming that the plane was in freefall the entire time (i.e. no gravitational acceleration toward the centre of the Earth). However, given that a minimum of 100 miles of this trip is in direct opposition to Earth's gravity, the amount of acceleration required is in addition to the amount of acceleration required to overcome Earth's gravity. Space Shuttle astronauts experience 3.2g of force when launching until they reach orbit. To know what this feels like, get on a roller coaster with a loop in it; the force at the bottom of the loop on a decent ride should be between 3 and 5g. Imagine experiencing that for an hour straight. I'd think you'll need not only a flight suit, but you'd have to be in pretty good shape as well.
There's absolutely no consistency to this guy's scoring at all. A couple memorable quotes:
...It was among the best answers I got from any of the other sites.
(referring to the question "Why did the Mormons settle in Utah?"). He points out that other sites gave him a couple of lame answers, and one of the other ones had a "factoid" (uncited fact?) that none of the other did. Those scored 2 and 3 out of 3 respectively, compared to 1 for having "one of the best answers". So having a bunch of crappy answers thrown in with a good one adds points? Make stuff up to improve further?
...Clever -- I never would have found the site on my own -- but not very original
(referring to the question "How do you make a grilled cheese sandwich?") What? Finding something you missed isn't considered an "original" answer to the question? How were the answers posted from this website irrelevant to the question? How were the recipes any less original compared to what the author already knew how to make? Just a lame excuse to score down the site in question.
I smell the astrosmell too. It's pretty much everywhere these days. The first postulation I heard of this idea was Douglas Hofstadter's "Reviews of this Book" book he discusses in one of his articles somewhere around 1983. Now everyone is doing it.
There are large portions of copyright law in both Canada and the US that cover this: Copyright holder's right to distribute, to copy, to public performance all seem to apply. However, I don't see that there's any history of television networks seeking damages from people who have recorded shows (removing advertisements, even) and then distributing that video tape to one or more friends for them to watch. This is the pre-Internet equivalent of what downloading a TV show post-air would be.
My interpretation is that making a personal copy of a television show is fair use. Sharing your copy with a friend would technically be a copyright violation, though the courts should consider the fact that this violation has not been pursued with any vigour in the past. I suppose the big issue here is that the copyright holder has the exclusive right to make copies of each episode. Thus, a collection of an entire season can be sold exclusively by the copyright holder. Allowing people to obtain episodes from the Internet would allow the potential for pirate copies of these collections to be sold. However, the potential for such collections to exist does not have real damages; only cases where such collections are actually being sold should be considered as damaging to the copyright holder.
That being said, being in the possession of an entire collection of encoded video files should not be the standard of evidence to prove copyright breach; after all, there are plenty of PVR (personal video recorder) devices and software available to obtain these copies legally. It is only the wide-scale distribution of these files to people who have not purchased one of these devices and the corresponding service (e.g. premium cable, satellite, TiVO) that is illegal.
I was unable to find any evidence on Google that television networks have ever launched a lawsuit over illegal distribution. I guess people passing VHS tapes around at school or the office never really became a problem. The equivalent to the availability of post-air recordings these days would be a guy with a large duffel bag of tapes hanging out on a busy downtown corner handing a tape to everyone that wants one. However, I think that failure to prosecute in the past needs to be considered before nailing big Internet distributors, especially if there's no money involved. "But it was never a problem in the past, your Honor" is a pretty weak argument, IMO.
There's two breaches I can think of that have major damages associated with them: selling the aforementioned collection of video files in direct competition to the copyright holder's collection, or making the video files available prior to airtime (that's a violation of the Public Performance right. I notice that the availability of pre-air shows has now dropped to zero). I hope the courts see things the same way.
Not bad, I've seen some of these before. The idea is to create a virtual version of the Encrypting PIN Pad (EPP) that most (well, should be all soon) ATMs use. The PIN pad runs as a Java applet on the client computer, and sends only an encrypted PIN block to the processor. The processor forwards this encrypted PIN block upstream to a financial institution as a normal ATM would. However, this solution is not as good as a real EPP for a couple of reasons
There's absolutely no guarantee that a Java applet that looks like a Virtual PIN pad actually does any encryption. This site would then have a copy of your unencrypted PIN and do the PIN encryption itself before sending upstream for authorization. This is the show-stopper, IMO. An open-source VEPP would be cool, but there'd have to be some way to verify that the applet received from a site claiming to be using it was actually using it. I see big problems for certifying a VEPP for secure use.
A physical EPP is sealed at the manufacturing plant before being shipped, and any attempt to break the seal renders it useless. A VEPP doesn't have this tamper-resistance. Thus, a virus on the client computer could gain access to the keystrokes prior to them being encrypted.
Despite the problems, however, I'd like to see more development in this area.
One of the better stories: I was snooping around on the computer's hard drive using Netscape by browsing "file:///", which was apparently "hacking". Curiosity killed the cat, I guess.
Wow, your sysadmin was a real jerk. I actually got caught pirating using the school network (lesson learned: pirating to just anyone is asking for trouble), which got me banned until they found out they needed geeks to operate PageMaker for the yearbook. hahaha:) The librarians just sighed every time I used the computer -- the latest attempts to keep the hackers out inevitably failed.
Geez, they don't even need to publish exploit details. I can figure it out from the technical details. Yet again, the need for the CLR to support this moronic language creates a very obvious security flaw. Once again, data being marshalled across process boundaries assumes the VB programmer knows what he's talking about, and doesn't safely pass the message string, instead allowing the marshaller to interpret it as code. Great. I'm sure we'll see a whole bunch of related exploits that target the.NETCOM marshaller.
Doesn't anybody know that the first rule of system programming is "Never trust your input"? Why on earth is something running with SYSTEM privileges not validating input it could have received from a Visual Basic programmer?
...lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes
(Emphasis added). No tin foil hat required. The British have decided to throw innocent until proven guilty away. Anything based on probability instead of hard evidence is circumstantial at best, and in this case doesn't stand up to "beyond a reasonable doubt." Until our entire society is clairvoyant, we simply can't (and shouldn't be able to!) convince a jury of 12 people that the personality disorder makes the person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
It's interesting that the RIAA made two cases here. The kids appear to be in some serious trouble. Of course, that's only because they have managed to convince some judges that seeding a file (or 1000) via P2P is on the same level as a full-blown for-profit piracy ring. Apparently the original defense was to convince a judge of the mother's illeteracy and blame everything on her inability to know what was going on. The 20-year-old daughter is certainly old enough to be sued on her own (kinda surprised about the 16-year-old son, though).
I really would hate to see something happen to the children. They're just another one of the RIAA's "making an example" cases, and it's really not a good example. This sort of legal bullying simply polarizes people into the submissive "Please don't sue me, I'll do anything you want" group, and those that are willing to escalate their grey-area file sharing into actual criminal activity.
Why can't they make an example of one of the "real problems"? You know, the pirates that are making hundreds of millions of dollars off pirated music and movies. I'd like to see those rich criminals go to jail too, and I'd bet that most people on P2P networks would too. IMO, winning a high-profile case like that would be a terrific example to casual users as well. It'd be like putting drug dealers in jail instead of drug users. You still send the same message "Drugs are bad", but the person who gets punished actually contributes significantly to the problems caused by drugs.
Oh wait. There are no pirates making hundreds of millions of dollars off pirated music and movies. That must be because there are legitimate people making hundreds of millions of dollars off legitimate music and movies. To me, the "real problem" is clearly stated in the last two sentences. Persecute criminals, not their victims or groupies.
Working the SuSE helpdesk wouldn't be as bad as you think. #1 call is going to be "I need to share these files from my Linux server to my Windows 2k/XP desktop." Microsoft will be motivated to make this happen (I've had some strange problems with this in the past). They really don't want the helpdesk response to be "Sorry, but Microsoft hasn't released that patch yet." They can blame Samba, sure, but then Microsoft looks stupid for associating with a product they won't stand behind. From an Interoperability standpoint, it seems that Microsoft is playing ball.
I think the only real problem here was the deliberate attempt to undermine the GPL. In the end, though, the effect is not as bad as we think. GPLv3 plugs the loophole, a Linux vendor gets a ton of cash from Microsoft, and life goes on. I don't like Novell getting in bed with Microsoft, but it's not like they had a whole lot of choice. $400 million is a lot to turn down on the basis of "principles", "morals" or "ethics". The important thing is that the timing of the announcement allowed the GPL to be developed to prevent any further deals of this nature to be made.
Sweet, they're all in Russian. Sounds like AllofMP3.com can also claim that something is lost in the translation if they actually go to court. Or perhaps they'll get a Russian judge...
One word: ridiculous. I'll believe that robots will start demanding rights when they start understanding verb tenses other than the imperative. I (or some other human) built it, told it how all of its systems work and gave it the ability to process commands that I give it. I could believe that something like the 3 Law of Robotics might apply in that it's impossible to build a stable neural network that's capable of widespread destruction or slaughter.
The robots they're discussing here are obviously sentient AI. AFAIK, there's no evidence that AI can do anything more than information processing at this point. It can't offer an opinion, write a play, or any of the "higher" functions us anthropocentric types that don't believe sentient AI could ever exist offer as counterexample. IMO, that's the primary difference between human intelligence and any theoretical AI. We can respond to language constructs that don't require us to respond. A computer simply doesn't know what to say when its input is optional.
Hey! Mr. Robot! I'm refusing to give you any rights! Do something about it already! Or don't. Your choice.
Indeed. A single binary file comprising one or more mailboxes that can't be easily diff'ed to make incremental backups sounds like a huge problem. And the Microsoft fanboi comment about "never having to restore a single mailbox" is just stupid. How can something be so poorly designed? Every other mail server I've used supports the Maildir format, which stores every *message* in it's own file. It's easy to diff these directories and make proper incremental backups. I don't have to make stupid procedures that malign restoring a single mailbox as "wrong", because I just can.
Hmmm. American? Perhaps you are one of many people suffering from the American economy's lack of desire to invest in consumer-grade DSL. Unfortunately for you, there's some considerable infrastructure upgrades that are required to bring fast, reliable service to your residence if it isn't already there. 6Mbps/1Mbps DSL is the DSL standard that the local Telco is releasing for the new year, and I've heard of cable rates around 20Mbps downstream. Or is that just not fast enough for you?;) I started on 2.5Mbps cable with horrible latency and constant bandwidth bottlenecking, so I'd say that my residential service has improved considerably in 8 years.
Doesn't sound like Sony got particularly chastised here. If I were Sony, or any other company interested in inflicting DRM on my customers, I'd happily pay the fees that they're talking about here. Total cost is less than $10M, which is a drop in the bucket for a large, multi-national corporation. If they succeed in inflicting their DRM, they win by taking our rights away. If they lose, then they get some R & D done about how to do better next time. If this judgement were to mean anything to the consumer, there would have to be significant punitive damages as well (I'm thinking in the neighbourhood of $100M or more).
Either way, not much to see here. Big company does nasty things with DRM, gets caught, walks away with dignity and wallet intact.
The whole point of Debian stable, from my point of view as a Net Admin., is that the whole thing is integration-tested. You can install and uninstall any package you want from the Debian apt repository, and the system will stay, you know, STABLE. Maybe you haven't done much stuff on the server side, but lack of integration testing is one of the biggest deficiencies of pretty much every distro I've used. I can't even count the number of times when a system starting acting up because of software that I'd recently installed. In some of those cases, even uninstalling the offending package(s) did not entirely resolve the problem.
Broken packaging is simply unacceptable for a production server. It's too bad that there's politics, and I'm itching to upgrade Sarge to Etch, but I'll let the Debian guys finish their stuff. They've got a really good track record from where I'm sitting. I really doubt that there's too much ego-stroking going on here -- after all they work for free.
But federal prosecutors say they don't need a search warrant to read your e-mail messages if those messages happen to be stored in someone else's computer.
But e-mail users should not expect privacy when they allow an outside party to store
their messages, prosecutors argue.
I don't use an outside party to store my e-mail. I connect using SSL when the remote server supports it. I accept SSL connections on my incoming e-mail. However, to prevent my computer from being flagged as a Spam host (simple DoS attack), I forward my mail through my ISP (who also accepts SSL connections). I am not storing this e-mail on my ISP's computer, and the message disappears from my ISP after it has been successfully sent. I am only allowing the ISP to store the message temporarily in case it can't be sent immediately.
The US law seems like a loophole which allows investigators, who can't get permission to read the e-mail on my server, to read my e-mail from the queue on my ISP's server. This would be like subverting the need for a wiretap warrant by tapping at the exchange rather than my residence. Anyone know if this is really the way it works? Or am I interpreting "stored in someone elses computer" too broadly? Is it safer for me to stop forwarding through my ISP if I value my privacy?
By default, no controls are considered safe. Sure, the applet can access all the Java classes that are in the classpath of the JRE used as the Java plugin, but it can't read/write the filesystem or connect to a network host other than the one the applet was obtained from without being given explicit permission to do so (by modifying the local Java policy). If the JVM isn't run with admin privileges, there's very little an applet can do unless it's signed. Even accepting an unsigned applet is reasonably safe, as the unsigned applet can't read your hard drive and send data back to the host. At any rate, why are you accepting an unsigned applet from someone you don't know?
But is interesting is that via Java hooks in QuickTime for Java, a Java applet could be used in conjunction with this Quartz Composer movie to do anything that a Java applet could instruct QuickTime to do - including take a shot of whatever is being displayed in the QuickTime movie - and then do anything else a Java applet could be designed to do - in this case, potentially send that image somewhere.
It's also interesting to note that a Java applet by default is designed not to do what you're suggesting. The worst case scenario is that you download an applet from a site, and it sends the image there. It would not, without modifying the local Java policy (not for n00bs), be able to send the image anywhere except the website you downloaded the applet from. You would have to accept the applet, and the warning very clearly states that accepting an unsigned applet is dangerous. If the applet is signed, the warning will tell you who signed it, and that accepting the applet requires trusting the signer. I'll admit, there's some people that might be taken in by this rogue applet, but doing nasty things with a Java applet was something that Java took some effort to prevent.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh* Teaching American history to Americans again. Is there anything that Americans do learn in school? ;)
The Versailles Treaty (which ended WWI) involved all parties, including the United States. It insisted on reparations being paid from Germany to France. It also established the Weimar Republic (a democratic government to replace King Wilhelm) and the League of Nations (a precursor to the UN). In protest of the reparation payments, the German government printed all the required bank notes from their treasury, thus causing massive hyperinflation. This happened in the early to late '20s. Hitler staged his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, and spent 9 months in jail, when he wrote Mein Kampf. In 1925, the Americans attempted to combat the weak German economy with the Dawson plan, which actually stabilized the economy somewhat. Had the stock market crash of 1929 not happened, it is likely that the Dawson plan would have restored normalcy to Europe and prevented a major economic factor leading to WWII.
However, the stock market crash led to increased radical thinking, and launched Hitler on his way to the Chancellory. The Versailles Treaty definitely set some important background leading up to WWII, but I'd say that the length of time between the end of WWI and WWII is too long to claim it as the only cause. Read some more; there's plenty of interesting theories about the rise of the Third Reich and WWII.
Feel free to mod OT.
mandelbr0t
Mod -1 troll plz:
IMO, if we're to go out and be the world's police, the world should pay us back (and more than just buying our Gov't bonds).Of course, that's assuming the world wants the Americans to be the world's police. I would endure the most chaotic and bloody anarchy to avoid having the American police having any power over me. Let's see DMCA, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay... Yes, those are the results of an enlightened and fair legal system -- NOT! I'm not even going to offer to let you pay me to be my police. At this point in time, the American idea of justice has cost me more money than I'd care to count. Keep your policemen, we sure as hell don't need 'em.
mandelbr0tmandelbr0t
Why "Ask Slashdot?"
The summary is already stupid. "I like Linux, but it may not work with my laptop, so I don't really want to risk it.", thus reducing x86 laptop solutions to either Vista or OSX, and inviting the loaded question. It sounds like our guy already knows what he wants the answer to be, and is just looking for some justifications to help him feel that he made the right choice.
Relax, OSX is nice. It'll probably have a bunch of DRM crap, too. Does it really matter to you? It's not like DRM is an issue for you since you discount Linux out-of-hand.
mandelbr0t
Your math would be correct assuming that the plane was in freefall the entire time (i.e. no gravitational acceleration toward the centre of the Earth). However, given that a minimum of 100 miles of this trip is in direct opposition to Earth's gravity, the amount of acceleration required is in addition to the amount of acceleration required to overcome Earth's gravity. Space Shuttle astronauts experience 3.2g of force when launching until they reach orbit. To know what this feels like, get on a roller coaster with a loop in it; the force at the bottom of the loop on a decent ride should be between 3 and 5g. Imagine experiencing that for an hour straight. I'd think you'll need not only a flight suit, but you'd have to be in pretty good shape as well.
mandelbr0t
qanda was very confusing as a tag. I'd rather have seen it as 'q&a'. I was thinking "Qanda? Isn't that an Australian airline or something?"
mandelbr0t
There's absolutely no consistency to this guy's scoring at all. A couple memorable quotes:
...It was among the best answers I got from any of the other sites.(referring to the question "Why did the Mormons settle in Utah?"). He points out that other sites gave him a couple of lame answers, and one of the other ones had a "factoid" (uncited fact?) that none of the other did. Those scored 2 and 3 out of 3 respectively, compared to 1 for having "one of the best answers". So having a bunch of crappy answers thrown in with a good one adds points? Make stuff up to improve further?
...Clever -- I never would have found the site on my own -- but not very original(referring to the question "How do you make a grilled cheese sandwich?") What? Finding something you missed isn't considered an "original" answer to the question? How were the answers posted from this website irrelevant to the question? How were the recipes any less original compared to what the author already knew how to make? Just a lame excuse to score down the site in question.
I smell the astrosmell too. It's pretty much everywhere these days. The first postulation I heard of this idea was Douglas Hofstadter's "Reviews of this Book" book he discusses in one of his articles somewhere around 1983. Now everyone is doing it.
mandelbr0t
There are large portions of copyright law in both Canada and the US that cover this: Copyright holder's right to distribute, to copy, to public performance all seem to apply. However, I don't see that there's any history of television networks seeking damages from people who have recorded shows (removing advertisements, even) and then distributing that video tape to one or more friends for them to watch. This is the pre-Internet equivalent of what downloading a TV show post-air would be.
My interpretation is that making a personal copy of a television show is fair use. Sharing your copy with a friend would technically be a copyright violation, though the courts should consider the fact that this violation has not been pursued with any vigour in the past. I suppose the big issue here is that the copyright holder has the exclusive right to make copies of each episode. Thus, a collection of an entire season can be sold exclusively by the copyright holder. Allowing people to obtain episodes from the Internet would allow the potential for pirate copies of these collections to be sold. However, the potential for such collections to exist does not have real damages; only cases where such collections are actually being sold should be considered as damaging to the copyright holder.
That being said, being in the possession of an entire collection of encoded video files should not be the standard of evidence to prove copyright breach; after all, there are plenty of PVR (personal video recorder) devices and software available to obtain these copies legally. It is only the wide-scale distribution of these files to people who have not purchased one of these devices and the corresponding service (e.g. premium cable, satellite, TiVO) that is illegal.
I was unable to find any evidence on Google that television networks have ever launched a lawsuit over illegal distribution. I guess people passing VHS tapes around at school or the office never really became a problem. The equivalent to the availability of post-air recordings these days would be a guy with a large duffel bag of tapes hanging out on a busy downtown corner handing a tape to everyone that wants one. However, I think that failure to prosecute in the past needs to be considered before nailing big Internet distributors, especially if there's no money involved. "But it was never a problem in the past, your Honor" is a pretty weak argument, IMO.
There's two breaches I can think of that have major damages associated with them: selling the aforementioned collection of video files in direct competition to the copyright holder's collection, or making the video files available prior to airtime (that's a violation of the Public Performance right. I notice that the availability of pre-air shows has now dropped to zero). I hope the courts see things the same way.
mandelbr0t
Not bad, I've seen some of these before. The idea is to create a virtual version of the Encrypting PIN Pad (EPP) that most (well, should be all soon) ATMs use. The PIN pad runs as a Java applet on the client computer, and sends only an encrypted PIN block to the processor. The processor forwards this encrypted PIN block upstream to a financial institution as a normal ATM would. However, this solution is not as good as a real EPP for a couple of reasons
Despite the problems, however, I'd like to see more development in this area.
mandelbr0t
Wow, your sysadmin was a real jerk. I actually got caught pirating using the school network (lesson learned: pirating to just anyone is asking for trouble), which got me banned until they found out they needed geeks to operate PageMaker for the yearbook. hahaha :) The librarians just sighed every time I used the computer -- the latest attempts to keep the hackers out inevitably failed.
mandelbr0t
Geez, they don't even need to publish exploit details. I can figure it out from the technical details. Yet again, the need for the CLR to support this moronic language creates a very obvious security flaw. Once again, data being marshalled across process boundaries assumes the VB programmer knows what he's talking about, and doesn't safely pass the message string, instead allowing the marshaller to interpret it as code. Great. I'm sure we'll see a whole bunch of related exploits that target the .NETCOM marshaller.
Doesn't anybody know that the first rule of system programming is "Never trust your input"? Why on earth is something running with SYSTEM privileges not validating input it could have received from a Visual Basic programmer?
mandelbr0t
...lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes(Emphasis added). No tin foil hat required. The British have decided to throw innocent until proven guilty away. Anything based on probability instead of hard evidence is circumstantial at best, and in this case doesn't stand up to "beyond a reasonable doubt." Until our entire society is clairvoyant, we simply can't (and shouldn't be able to!) convince a jury of 12 people that the personality disorder makes the person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
mandelbr0t
Seems to go along with their recent design patent. I guess they can add a fourth drawing to their patent. But I'm guessing this will be a new one.
mandelbr0t
It's interesting that the RIAA made two cases here. The kids appear to be in some serious trouble. Of course, that's only because they have managed to convince some judges that seeding a file (or 1000) via P2P is on the same level as a full-blown for-profit piracy ring. Apparently the original defense was to convince a judge of the mother's illeteracy and blame everything on her inability to know what was going on. The 20-year-old daughter is certainly old enough to be sued on her own (kinda surprised about the 16-year-old son, though).
I really would hate to see something happen to the children. They're just another one of the RIAA's "making an example" cases, and it's really not a good example. This sort of legal bullying simply polarizes people into the submissive "Please don't sue me, I'll do anything you want" group, and those that are willing to escalate their grey-area file sharing into actual criminal activity.
Why can't they make an example of one of the "real problems"? You know, the pirates that are making hundreds of millions of dollars off pirated music and movies. I'd like to see those rich criminals go to jail too, and I'd bet that most people on P2P networks would too.
IMO, winning a high-profile case like that would be a terrific example to casual users as well. It'd be like putting drug dealers in jail instead of drug users. You still send the same message "Drugs are bad", but the person who gets punished actually contributes significantly to the problems caused by drugs.
Oh wait. There are no pirates making hundreds of millions of dollars off pirated music and movies. That must be because there are legitimate people making hundreds of millions of dollars off legitimate music and movies. To me, the "real problem" is clearly stated in the last two sentences. Persecute criminals, not their victims or groupies.
mandelbr0t
Working the SuSE helpdesk wouldn't be as bad as you think. #1 call is going to be "I need to share these files from my Linux server to my Windows 2k/XP desktop." Microsoft will be motivated to make this happen (I've had some strange problems with this in the past). They really don't want the helpdesk response to be "Sorry, but Microsoft hasn't released that patch yet." They can blame Samba, sure, but then Microsoft looks stupid for associating with a product they won't stand behind. From an Interoperability standpoint, it seems that Microsoft is playing ball.
I think the only real problem here was the deliberate attempt to undermine the GPL. In the end, though, the effect is not as bad as we think. GPLv3 plugs the loophole, a Linux vendor gets a ton of cash from Microsoft, and life goes on. I don't like Novell getting in bed with Microsoft, but it's not like they had a whole lot of choice. $400 million is a lot to turn down on the basis of "principles", "morals" or "ethics". The important thing is that the timing of the announcement allowed the GPL to be developed to prevent any further deals of this nature to be made.
mandelbr0t
Sweet, they're all in Russian. Sounds like AllofMP3.com can also claim that something is lost in the translation if they actually go to court. Or perhaps they'll get a Russian judge...
mandelbr0t
One word: ridiculous. I'll believe that robots will start demanding rights when they start understanding verb tenses other than the imperative. I (or some other human) built it, told it how all of its systems work and gave it the ability to process commands that I give it. I could believe that something like the 3 Law of Robotics might apply in that it's impossible to build a stable neural network that's capable of widespread destruction or slaughter.
The robots they're discussing here are obviously sentient AI. AFAIK, there's no evidence that AI can do anything more than information processing at this point. It can't offer an opinion, write a play, or any of the "higher" functions us anthropocentric types that don't believe sentient AI could ever exist offer as counterexample. IMO, that's the primary difference between human intelligence and any theoretical AI. We can respond to language constructs that don't require us to respond. A computer simply doesn't know what to say when its input is optional.
Hey! Mr. Robot! I'm refusing to give you any rights! Do something about it already! Or don't. Your choice.
mandelbr0t
Indeed. A single binary file comprising one or more mailboxes that can't be easily diff'ed to make incremental backups sounds like a huge problem. And the Microsoft fanboi comment about "never having to restore a single mailbox" is just stupid. How can something be so poorly designed? Every other mail server I've used supports the Maildir format, which stores every *message* in it's own file. It's easy to diff these directories and make proper incremental backups. I don't have to make stupid procedures that malign restoring a single mailbox as "wrong", because I just can.
mandelbr0t
Straight from the devil's (Ballmer's) mouth:
...we understand there's going to be Unix on Intel, and therefore Linux, for the long foreseeable future.Hooray! Microsoft has acknowledged the survivability of Linux! Who'd-a-thunk-it?
mandelbr0t
Hmmm. American? Perhaps you are one of many people suffering from the American economy's lack of desire to invest in consumer-grade DSL. Unfortunately for you, there's some considerable infrastructure upgrades that are required to bring fast, reliable service to your residence if it isn't already there. 6Mbps/1Mbps DSL is the DSL standard that the local Telco is releasing for the new year, and I've heard of cable rates around 20Mbps downstream. Or is that just not fast enough for you? ;) I started on 2.5Mbps cable with horrible latency and constant bandwidth bottlenecking, so I'd say that my residential service has improved considerably in 8 years.
mandelbr0t
Doesn't sound like Sony got particularly chastised here. If I were Sony, or any other company interested in inflicting DRM on my customers, I'd happily pay the fees that they're talking about here. Total cost is less than $10M, which is a drop in the bucket for a large, multi-national corporation. If they succeed in inflicting their DRM, they win by taking our rights away. If they lose, then they get some R & D done about how to do better next time. If this judgement were to mean anything to the consumer, there would have to be significant punitive damages as well (I'm thinking in the neighbourhood of $100M or more).
Either way, not much to see here. Big company does nasty things with DRM, gets caught, walks away with dignity and wallet intact.
mandelbr0t
The whole point of Debian stable, from my point of view as a Net Admin., is that the whole thing is integration-tested. You can install and uninstall any package you want from the Debian apt repository, and the system will stay, you know, STABLE. Maybe you haven't done much stuff on the server side, but lack of integration testing is one of the biggest deficiencies of pretty much every distro I've used. I can't even count the number of times when a system starting acting up because of software that I'd recently installed. In some of those cases, even uninstalling the offending package(s) did not entirely resolve the problem.
Broken packaging is simply unacceptable for a production server. It's too bad that there's politics, and I'm itching to upgrade Sarge to Etch, but I'll let the Debian guys finish their stuff. They've got a really good track record from where I'm sitting. I really doubt that there's too much ego-stroking going on here -- after all they work for free.
mandelbr0t
I don't use an outside party to store my e-mail. I connect using SSL when the remote server supports it. I accept SSL connections on my incoming e-mail. However, to prevent my computer from being flagged as a Spam host (simple DoS attack), I forward my mail through my ISP (who also accepts SSL connections). I am not storing this e-mail on my ISP's computer, and the message disappears from my ISP after it has been successfully sent. I am only allowing the ISP to store the message temporarily in case it can't be sent immediately.
The US law seems like a loophole which allows investigators, who can't get permission to read the e-mail on my server, to read my e-mail from the queue on my ISP's server. This would be like subverting the need for a wiretap warrant by tapping at the exchange rather than my residence. Anyone know if this is really the way it works? Or am I interpreting "stored in someone elses computer" too broadly? Is it safer for me to stop forwarding through my ISP if I value my privacy?
mandelbr0t
By default, no controls are considered safe. Sure, the applet can access all the Java classes that are in the classpath of the JRE used as the Java plugin, but it can't read/write the filesystem or connect to a network host other than the one the applet was obtained from without being given explicit permission to do so (by modifying the local Java policy). If the JVM isn't run with admin privileges, there's very little an applet can do unless it's signed. Even accepting an unsigned applet is reasonably safe, as the unsigned applet can't read your hard drive and send data back to the host. At any rate, why are you accepting an unsigned applet from someone you don't know?
mandelbr0t
It's also interesting to note that a Java applet by default is designed not to do what you're suggesting. The worst case scenario is that you download an applet from a site, and it sends the image there. It would not, without modifying the local Java policy (not for n00bs), be able to send the image anywhere except the website you downloaded the applet from. You would have to accept the applet, and the warning very clearly states that accepting an unsigned applet is dangerous. If the applet is signed, the warning will tell you who signed it, and that accepting the applet requires trusting the signer. I'll admit, there's some people that might be taken in by this rogue applet, but doing nasty things with a Java applet was something that Java took some effort to prevent.
mandelbr0t