What an apology! Let's cut it up into all of it's distortions and slanders:
The main problem is that complex software is just hard to secure.
Ding! Lie: It has problems because of all the cool things it does for you. Reality: It's bad features and bad designs, not complexity. Most systems do much more than Vista does but do not have the same kind of problems. Linux, Mac, Solaris all have servers user features M$ is still trying to catch up to but none of the problems. The only complexity contained in M$ code is anti-competitive gotchas and digital restrictions, which are like anti-features.
And not just complex MS software - they are not the only ones suffering these kinds of vulnerabilities.
Ding! Slander: Everyone else sucks too Reality: Yeah right. Show me a virus for another OS that survives outside of a lab. Once again, no one but M$ users have these problems.
You can't stop the attack where someone just downloads something and blindly runs it.
Ding! Distortion: blame the user.
Reality: The fault we are talking about involves no user action other than surfing a web page. This is a design and poor code issue, not a user problem. Strangely enough, Apple does just fine selling systems to people who don't ever want to know anything about computers.
Vista isn't perfect, but it's a step closer.
Ding! Lie: M$ is working hard and is very close to having a secure system. Reality: M$ slapped a bunch of code together to make Windoze. They spent the last six years putting digital restrictions in it instead of fixing things. Microsoft is all marketing.
It's the PC heritage, going back to the days when no-one in the non-Unix PC world gave the slightest thought to security, because you could get away with it back then.
They did not get away with it. Macro viruses blew out computer labs and people's systems and caused all manner of havoc.
Worse, M$ knew better and everyone told them so. They had Xenix, they helped make OS/2, they knew what they were doing, they just decided to hold on their DOS legacy. It was then and still is a matter of negligence. Other people did not and still don't have the same kinds of problems. Xenix, Minux, Linux, BSD, even Apple and Palm did better. People are still telling them so.
The only reason there's a perception that these are "computer" or "PC" problems is that M$ runs a billion dollar a month marketing program. That billion bucks includes astroturf, public corruption, bribes and everything they can think of to get people to tell you that M$ is the best, it has all the features everything else does and everything else has all their problems. This is a tremendous disservice to the public.
so what you are telling me here is that if I allow my operating system to be compromised, it will be compromised?
Yes, but there will be no trace of it on your hard drive, anti-virus writers don't check BIOS, so you will never know people are logging into your system and taking what they want. Ha ha.
But no, what your AC sock puppets have claimed is not true - this won't work on gnu/linux. It only works for Vista by exploiting M$ specific flaws. Those flaws were originally designed to lock you out of your kernel and it looks like they have done exactly that. Show me the gnu/linux demonstration and I might believe you. Right now, all claims of such are the usual FUD. "... but, but M$ is the best, every thing else must suck as badly," all the M$ turds always cry but it never comes to pass. It sucks to be you, dedazo.
By the way twitter, how do you feel about how "M$" enjoyed a 60% jump in revenue on Vista and new office sales in the last quarter? Looks like Vista is doing well!
They stuffed their channels and I don't expect the next quarter to look very good. Studies that show that only one in ten people are planning to use Vista better and that a large percentage of businesses never plan to move to Vista are more in tune with reality. The fact that M$ has not and will not fix their security model makes me think those numbers will go south. Give the channels another quarter of crappy sales and all hell will break lose for M$ as they are forced to admit they overbought Vista. The partners have been starved for six years, this is supposed to be their best year ever. Their investors will demand better and 2007 will be the year of Linux.
Taunts like that are fun. Keep it up, M$ marketdroids!
Chrissake...he's not Ceausescu or Stalin or someone else who has caused intense suffering (beyond the typical Slashbot "suffering" of DRM) and performed insane abuses of human rights
Other can abuses only come after the first are tolerated: suppression of free speech. People who know the truth cast off tyrants. Valenti did much to extend the limits of physical media into the electronic world and convinced many people like you that such restrictions must exist and are acceptable.
Digital restrictions are not acceptable because they eliminate your freedom. You already must chose between that freedom and participation in popular culture. Those who chose freedom are that much less able to relate with and convince others to fight for their own freedom, not that those who chose restrictions have any more ability to control or use their culture. For digital restrictions to be universally applied, all of us must relinquish ownership of our computers to those who would decide what we can and can't copy. That control gives total information control to it's masters, worse than any before. From there any abuse can go on.
People under Stalin were told they were free and were forced to dance and sing about their freedom and happiness. Those that disagreed were exterminated. The system existed by a combination of total information control, lawless exercise of power and snitching. People unable to hope for real freedom turned against each other to fight for petty comforts and survival. The makers of non free culture have similar campaigns to divide and make helpless their victims. You may think their power is insignificant, but that is only because you chose not to fight it openly.
Valenti may have just fallen in with the wrong people after his service; he may have been raised by parents who chided him for "stealing ideas", etc.
It impossible to find the phrase "stealing ideas" in print before 30 years ago. This is a concept created and propagated by people like Valenti. I can only hope that bad idea goes with him.
Nothing is new with the Vista security model. Check out boot kits and how they are able to do things like elevate command.com to system, open telnet servers and other goodies from 1500 bytes in the boot sector. Forever Pwned.
Speaking to those of you who have expressed distasteful feelings here, try to remember that there is such a thing as "winning gracefully," "being a good sport" or whatever you wish to call it.
The most disrespectful sentiment is that his death is some sort of victory. It's not because the bad policies and laws he fostered and believed in are still here. His passing brings some hope of change and that is what we celebrate.
This isn't the time to debate them [unAmerican laws].
On the contrary, now is the perfect time to reflect on the man and his beliefs and what he accomplished. What better time will there ever be?
He believed in digital restrictions until at least 2004 and probably went to his grave without understanding the real social cost of such control. To this day, I'm forced to chose between digital freedom and participation in popular culture. There is no middle ground because people like him considered you and me an insignificant minority who should use other options. Rights don't work like that. You can't violate people's rights because few people would bother to exercise them. While many of the things he said have been repudiated for 20 years, the logic he used never changed and he continued to say things we all hate. Those things hurt all of us every day.
The passing of generations is often the only way real change happens. Mr. Valenti was a product of a different time. His loyalties reflect those times but his intransigence is timeless. The run away success of the VCR was helpful to those he professed loyalty toward, and his opposition was harmful to them. It is surprising that he never learned the lesson. We can all feel sad for his family but we can also look at the world as a place that's a little less hostile.
he was at one time a valuable member of the human race, and flew 51 combat missions as the pilot of a B-25 during WWII.
He did his duty and that is admirable, but his record for oppressing others afterwards leads me to believe that his choice of sides was an accident of birth. Good and evil involve more than bravery and sacrifice.
Ohio state university is not congress. They are private entity. If I run a school, coffee shop or bar, I can block whatever traffic I want to on my open wireless access point.
Ohio State is not private, nor is the internet. You are not free to interfere with your customer's cell phone transmissions, their wired phone call or the US post they might have in their pocket. Sooner or later, people are going to demand the same kind of protections for their internet traffic as well. In the mean time, you are free to annoy your coffee shop users as you please. Why you want to do that is another matter, best answered by introspection or therapy.
You missed the first five words there - "Congress shall make no law". There's no law here being made.
Nice try, but Ohio can't violate your free speech rights either. This applies to laws, "rules" and any policy that might violate the first amendment. The violation remains, no matter what you call it or who does it.
A silly Windoze user tries to apply M$ logic to free software:
Do you think if you downloaded an open source firewall that your head would explode?
No, because I'd own the firewall and would not use it to infringe on the rights of others. Because I don't run Windoze, I don't need to "firewall" much and only have such things because my ISP will only provide a single IP address that I must share with others.
The matter between Wiley and the blogger was resolved by the publisher ignominiously blaming the "junior member of staff" they had tasked with their dirty work. They admitted no fault and continue to push against fair use by demanding permission up front, not from the author but from themselves. The matter between Wiley and the wider world, therefore, remains open.
I would not recommend anything rude, but the publisher should hear that we are not slaves and do not want to live in a permission society. They will listen because they need us more than we need them.
making a copy of something and selling 50,000 copies of it (or putting it on a P2P network for 5 million people to download) is a crime.
Selling 50,000 coppies of someone else's work is civil not a criminal violation. The neither the person's work or reputation is destroyed by your actions, nor is the public harmed. You may have cost the author money and they can sue you for it, but this is not a crime.
Sharing something is even less of a crime. Only publication is properly banned by copyright and you will have a hard time convincing anyone that one or two coppies is a publication. If sharing was a crime or outraged the public, we would have no public libraries, so think very hard before you advocate digital restrictions that are more severe than those that have always existed for physical coppies.
The point of copyright law is to spread knowledge and advance the state of the art. When the law thwarts those things, the law is out of line and needs to be fixed.
Go enroll at OU, then sue them for violating your free speech because they won't allow p2p traffic on the network.
Why don't you just ask me to move to China? I'd rather you do that than continue to advocate censorship in the US.
... in all this process they find out that, indeed, some bonehead actually is distributing thousands of songs that he or she has no right to distribute. I'm failing to see how that isn't a strong case.
There are two problems with your reasoning. The first is you are wrong about the strength of these cases. Despite the tremendous threats to everything they own, people have fought them and won. The second problem is that copyright violations are a poor reason to ban publications. If you applied the same reasoning to the world of print, you end up with a few state approved publishers... much like the world of broadcast media, and everyone else is out of luck. That's unAmerican.
nobody has to provide you with a soapbox to preach from.
You know, I can go backwards and forwards with this. If you take your goofey reasoning to meat space your soap box includes the very air between us. Our freedoms have been won and preserved through force of arms. We pay for those arms all the time, some more than others. No one is asking for a soap box, they are asking to use what they have bought and paid for. What you are trying to justify is limiting how people are able to publish and you are willing to bring the whole force of law down on those who would defy you. It's wrong and no amount of name calling will make it right.
... you totally don't have the spine... You just like to talk and talk but you'll never go out there and actually fight the fight.... you're totally full of bullshit.... your fantasy... Blah blah blah. Put up or shut up.... you sound like a child crying that you're not getting your way. Wah wah wah.... for your next tantrum... how ballistic you are... like a spastic six year old... completely irrelevant, unrealistic spew... Get some perspective and grow up...
People will always steal content, with or without DRM.
Making a copy of something is not "stealing".
Of course, I agree with everything you say about eliminating digital restrictions and how that's what the industry really needs to do. Thanks for the down under perspective of licensing issues.
As there isn't a unified DRM standard, they can't release that software yet, but if there some day will be, then they some day will release that software.
The universally accepted and demanded DRM scheme is a lack of digital restrictions. That's the standard they will use if they really mean what they say about fair use. There is nothing simple about them forcing restrictions on the industry and their customers and ultimately any restrictions limit your fair use rights by limiting what players you can use.
Its expensive because you buy a T1 circuit (point to point) from your telco for some large amount per month. Typically you pay an amount that covers BOTH endpoints.
No they don't. They have an IP address and an accusation, many of which have been proved false. What they have is the strength of bad laws that allow them to take everything you own or waste it all with court motions, both of which are better called "judicial extortion" than justice.
1) Sending someone else's creative work to ten thousand of your best friends is not speech.
Keeping me from publishing my own work on the network I pay for is a violation of free speech.
If you want to publish your own content via p2p, go ahead and do so on a network that isn't subsidized by the rest of your community.
Second, how can I share by P2P when idiot operators block my traffic? I can buy all the hardware and service I want, but I won't be able to use it if it's censored at the receiving end.
Make no mistake, the big publishers want to make the internet look like cable TV and they are almost there. Unless you fight for your rights, you will play no further part than as a "consumer" and others will continue to own your culture.
we are implementing pay for service very soon (mainly to cover the cost of re-wiring our older buildings as well as wiring newly purchased properties)
My university has had a flat tech fee for years to pay for stuff like that. Some of that spending has been missused on personal tracking technology, "software deals" from M$, and obnoxious network logins, but there is no bandwith problem. This, despite a typical bot/spam gamer and p2p load. I can't imagine them charging per bandwith consumed.
Slashdot Mirror
What an apology! Let's cut it up into all of it's distortions and slanders:
The main problem is that complex software is just hard to secure.
Ding! Lie: It has problems because of all the cool things it does for you.
Reality: It's bad features and bad designs, not complexity. Most systems do much more than Vista does but do not have the same kind of problems. Linux, Mac, Solaris all have servers user features M$ is still trying to catch up to but none of the problems. The only complexity contained in M$ code is anti-competitive gotchas and digital restrictions, which are like anti-features.
And not just complex MS software - they are not the only ones suffering these kinds of vulnerabilities.
Ding! Slander: Everyone else sucks too
Reality: Yeah right. Show me a virus for another OS that survives outside of a lab. Once again, no one but M$ users have these problems.
You can't stop the attack where someone just downloads something and blindly runs it.
Ding! Distortion: blame the user.
Reality: The fault we are talking about involves no user action other than surfing a web page. This is a design and poor code issue, not a user problem. Strangely enough, Apple does just fine selling systems to people who don't ever want to know anything about computers.
Vista isn't perfect, but it's a step closer.
Ding! Lie: M$ is working hard and is very close to having a secure system.
Reality: M$ slapped a bunch of code together to make Windoze. They spent the last six years putting digital restrictions in it instead of fixing things. Microsoft is all marketing.
It's the PC heritage, going back to the days when no-one in the non-Unix PC world gave the slightest thought to security, because you could get away with it back then.
They did not get away with it. Macro viruses blew out computer labs and people's systems and caused all manner of havoc.
Worse, M$ knew better and everyone told them so. They had Xenix, they helped make OS/2, they knew what they were doing, they just decided to hold on their DOS legacy. It was then and still is a matter of negligence. Other people did not and still don't have the same kinds of problems. Xenix, Minux, Linux, BSD, even Apple and Palm did better. People are still telling them so.
The only reason there's a perception that these are "computer" or "PC" problems is that M$ runs a billion dollar a month marketing program. That billion bucks includes astroturf, public corruption, bribes and everything they can think of to get people to tell you that M$ is the best, it has all the features everything else does and everything else has all their problems. This is a tremendous disservice to the public.
so what you are telling me here is that if I allow my operating system to be compromised, it will be compromised?
Yes, but there will be no trace of it on your hard drive, anti-virus writers don't check BIOS, so you will never know people are logging into your system and taking what they want. Ha ha.
But no, what your AC sock puppets have claimed is not true - this won't work on gnu/linux. It only works for Vista by exploiting M$ specific flaws. Those flaws were originally designed to lock you out of your kernel and it looks like they have done exactly that. Show me the gnu/linux demonstration and I might believe you. Right now, all claims of such are the usual FUD. "... but, but M$ is the best, every thing else must suck as badly," all the M$ turds always cry but it never comes to pass. It sucks to be you, dedazo.
An AC pest taunts,
By the way twitter, how do you feel about how "M$" enjoyed a 60% jump in revenue on Vista and new office sales in the last quarter? Looks like Vista is doing well!
They stuffed their channels and I don't expect the next quarter to look very good. Studies that show that only one in ten people are planning to use Vista better and that a large percentage of businesses never plan to move to Vista are more in tune with reality. The fact that M$ has not and will not fix their security model makes me think those numbers will go south. Give the channels another quarter of crappy sales and all hell will break lose for M$ as they are forced to admit they overbought Vista. The partners have been starved for six years, this is supposed to be their best year ever. Their investors will demand better and 2007 will be the year of Linux.
Taunts like that are fun. Keep it up, M$ marketdroids!
I can't see anything in that article that would stop that exact same attack working on Linux.
Go ahead and make one then. I'm sure Mr. Gates would promise to pay you well and then stab you in the back, but you would have proved your point.
Thanks, I'm not half as organized with my Slashdoting as you are!
A pest writes:
Chrissake...he's not Ceausescu or Stalin or someone else who has caused intense suffering (beyond the typical Slashbot "suffering" of DRM) and performed insane abuses of human rights
Other can abuses only come after the first are tolerated: suppression of free speech. People who know the truth cast off tyrants. Valenti did much to extend the limits of physical media into the electronic world and convinced many people like you that such restrictions must exist and are acceptable.
Digital restrictions are not acceptable because they eliminate your freedom. You already must chose between that freedom and participation in popular culture. Those who chose freedom are that much less able to relate with and convince others to fight for their own freedom, not that those who chose restrictions have any more ability to control or use their culture. For digital restrictions to be universally applied, all of us must relinquish ownership of our computers to those who would decide what we can and can't copy. That control gives total information control to it's masters, worse than any before. From there any abuse can go on.
People under Stalin were told they were free and were forced to dance and sing about their freedom and happiness. Those that disagreed were exterminated. The system existed by a combination of total information control, lawless exercise of power and snitching. People unable to hope for real freedom turned against each other to fight for petty comforts and survival. The makers of non free culture have similar campaigns to divide and make helpless their victims. You may think their power is insignificant, but that is only because you chose not to fight it openly.
Valenti may have just fallen in with the wrong people after his service; he may have been raised by parents who chided him for "stealing ideas", etc.
It impossible to find the phrase "stealing ideas" in print before 30 years ago. This is a concept created and propagated by people like Valenti. I can only hope that bad idea goes with him.
Nothing is new with the Vista security model. Check out boot kits and how they are able to do things like elevate command.com to system, open telnet servers and other goodies from 1500 bytes in the boot sector. Forever Pwned.
Speaking to those of you who have expressed distasteful feelings here, try to remember that there is such a thing as "winning gracefully," "being a good sport" or whatever you wish to call it.
The most disrespectful sentiment is that his death is some sort of victory. It's not because the bad policies and laws he fostered and believed in are still here. His passing brings some hope of change and that is what we celebrate.
This isn't the time to debate them [unAmerican laws].
On the contrary, now is the perfect time to reflect on the man and his beliefs and what he accomplished. What better time will there ever be?
He believed in digital restrictions until at least 2004 and probably went to his grave without understanding the real social cost of such control. To this day, I'm forced to chose between digital freedom and participation in popular culture. There is no middle ground because people like him considered you and me an insignificant minority who should use other options. Rights don't work like that. You can't violate people's rights because few people would bother to exercise them. While many of the things he said have been repudiated for 20 years, the logic he used never changed and he continued to say things we all hate. Those things hurt all of us every day.
The passing of generations is often the only way real change happens. Mr. Valenti was a product of a different time. His loyalties reflect those times but his intransigence is timeless. The run away success of the VCR was helpful to those he professed loyalty toward, and his opposition was harmful to them. It is surprising that he never learned the lesson. We can all feel sad for his family but we can also look at the world as a place that's a little less hostile.
better the enemy you know, than the unknown that will rise to take his place.
Still afraid of the dark, are we? Tacitus derided this attitude 1900 years ago. Your imagination should lead you to do things, not cower in fear.
Do you think they could have picked a creepier picture of him? I mean, most people have to work hard to look like this.
he was at one time a valuable member of the human race, and flew 51 combat missions as the pilot of a B-25 during WWII.
He did his duty and that is admirable, but his record for oppressing others afterwards leads me to believe that his choice of sides was an accident of birth. Good and evil involve more than bravery and sacrifice.
Ohio state university is not congress. They are private entity. If I run a school, coffee shop or bar, I can block whatever traffic I want to on my open wireless access point.
Ohio State is not private, nor is the internet. You are not free to interfere with your customer's cell phone transmissions, their wired phone call or the US post they might have in their pocket. Sooner or later, people are going to demand the same kind of protections for their internet traffic as well. In the mean time, you are free to annoy your coffee shop users as you please. Why you want to do that is another matter, best answered by introspection or therapy.
You missed the first five words there - "Congress shall make no law". There's no law here being made.
Nice try, but Ohio can't violate your free speech rights either. This applies to laws, "rules" and any policy that might violate the first amendment. The violation remains, no matter what you call it or who does it.
A silly Windoze user tries to apply M$ logic to free software:
Do you think if you downloaded an open source firewall that your head would explode?
No, because I'd own the firewall and would not use it to infringe on the rights of others. Because I don't run Windoze, I don't need to "firewall" much and only have such things because my ISP will only provide a single IP address that I must share with others.
The matter between Wiley and the blogger was resolved by the publisher ignominiously blaming the "junior member of staff" they had tasked with their dirty work. They admitted no fault and continue to push against fair use by demanding permission up front, not from the author but from themselves. The matter between Wiley and the wider world, therefore, remains open.
I would not recommend anything rude, but the publisher should hear that we are not slaves and do not want to live in a permission society. They will listen because they need us more than we need them.
One of my many fans misses the point, as usual:
making a copy of something and selling 50,000 copies of it (or putting it on a P2P network for 5 million people to download) is a crime.
Selling 50,000 coppies of someone else's work is civil not a criminal violation. The neither the person's work or reputation is destroyed by your actions, nor is the public harmed. You may have cost the author money and they can sue you for it, but this is not a crime.
Sharing something is even less of a crime. Only publication is properly banned by copyright and you will have a hard time convincing anyone that one or two coppies is a publication. If sharing was a crime or outraged the public, we would have no public libraries, so think very hard before you advocate digital restrictions that are more severe than those that have always existed for physical coppies.
The point of copyright law is to spread knowledge and advance the state of the art. When the law thwarts those things, the law is out of line and needs to be fixed.
Go enroll at OU, then sue them for violating your free speech because they won't allow p2p traffic on the network.
Why don't you just ask me to move to China? I'd rather you do that than continue to advocate censorship in the US.
There are two problems with your reasoning. The first is you are wrong about the strength of these cases. Despite the tremendous threats to everything they own, people have fought them and won. The second problem is that copyright violations are a poor reason to ban publications. If you applied the same reasoning to the world of print, you end up with a few state approved publishers ... much like the world of broadcast media, and everyone else is out of luck. That's unAmerican.
nobody has to provide you with a soapbox to preach from.
You know, I can go backwards and forwards with this. If you take your goofey reasoning to meat space your soap box includes the very air between us. Our freedoms have been won and preserved through force of arms. We pay for those arms all the time, some more than others. No one is asking for a soap box, they are asking to use what they have bought and paid for. What you are trying to justify is limiting how people are able to publish and you are willing to bring the whole force of law down on those who would defy you. It's wrong and no amount of name calling will make it right.
Yeah, yeah, fuck you very much.
People will always steal content, with or without DRM.
Making a copy of something is not "stealing".
Of course, I agree with everything you say about eliminating digital restrictions and how that's what the industry really needs to do. Thanks for the down under perspective of licensing issues.
As there isn't a unified DRM standard, they can't release that software yet, but if there some day will be, then they some day will release that software.
The universally accepted and demanded DRM scheme is a lack of digital restrictions. That's the standard they will use if they really mean what they say about fair use. There is nothing simple about them forcing restrictions on the industry and their customers and ultimately any restrictions limit your fair use rights by limiting what players you can use.
Its expensive because you buy a T1 circuit (point to point) from your telco for some large amount per month. Typically you pay an amount that covers BOTH endpoints.
I thought it was because the telco was charging for services they never delivered, charging outrageous fees for the services they do provide and putting the money in their pockets, you know, robbing everyone blind.
I don't know why twitter, but I always think of this [cute kitten image] when I read these posts of yours.
Thanks, I like kittens. Here's as many of them as you want. Here are boobs. (very nice!)
For some reason though, whenever I see your name Bungi, I think of this (shit).
The RIAA almost always has a very strong case.
No they don't. They have an IP address and an accusation, many of which have been proved false. What they have is the strength of bad laws that allow them to take everything you own or waste it all with court motions, both of which are better called "judicial extortion" than justice.
1) Sending someone else's creative work to ten thousand of your best friends is not speech.
Keeping me from publishing my own work on the network I pay for is a violation of free speech.
If you want to publish your own content via p2p, go ahead and do so on a network that isn't subsidized by the rest of your community.
First, because the networks are highly regulated all of them are publically subsidized. The network operators may not be living up to their obligations and might have wasted two hundred billion of your dollars, but they are ultimately yours and can be ordered to perform.
Second, how can I share by P2P when idiot operators block my traffic? I can buy all the hardware and service I want, but I won't be able to use it if it's censored at the receiving end.
Make no mistake, the big publishers want to make the internet look like cable TV and they are almost there. Unless you fight for your rights, you will play no further part than as a "consumer" and others will continue to own your culture.
wouldn't ignoring a C&D or subpoena get you in legal trouble of some sort?
I hearby order you to C&D. Not convinced? Good.
A real subpoena is different. The RIAA does not really have those.
we are implementing pay for service very soon (mainly to cover the cost of re-wiring our older buildings as well as wiring newly purchased properties)
My university has had a flat tech fee for years to pay for stuff like that. Some of that spending has been missused on personal tracking technology, "software deals" from M$, and obnoxious network logins, but there is no bandwith problem. This, despite a typical bot/spam gamer and p2p load. I can't imagine them charging per bandwith consumed.