This comment might be irrelevant since it's so far down the stack, but here are some facts about this technology (I work for PGP (now Symantec), and we just released software to support it):
This isn't stealth technology - it's the opposite of stealth. Not only is it completely opt-in, you have to pay for it.
This isn't in the processor, it's in support chips - they've added a "manageability engine" ("ME") to the chipset, not the processor.
The SMS capability requires an integrated 3G modem from another vendor. There are specs that let the modem be connected to the ME, but I only know of one modem vendor that supports this today. If you don't have the SMS support, it still works over TCP/IP when the laptop connects to the Internet (assuming your management server has a leg in the DMZ)
To support Anti-Theft, the laptop needs to go through an "activation" process that binds the laptop to a corporate, on-premises management server. Only this server can disable a laptop, and only via a command issued at the server. In other words, you call IT, you say your machine's been stolen, they shut it down.
It's recoverable. You realize your brother just borrowed it, you call IT, they reactivate it.
We're tying it to our whole disk encryption product, so all user credentials are also locked up when the kill pill is sent. This way, (a) your data is safe, and (b) even a weak password can't be brute forced. An attacker now needs to break a recovery token with 256 bits of entropy to get your data. We don't even let you buy anti-theft unless you already have WDE.
It's not just about anti-theft. If you're taking your machine through customs, into a hostile area, or even shipping it across the country, you can now have it completely locked and cryptographically secure (even from insiders). If it gets "lost" in shipment, then you recover the laptop cost from insurance - but don't worry about the data loss.
The idea is that if you slap an Anti-Theft sticker on the laptop, then a thief will move on to another system instead of stealing yours (expect a robust aftermarket in stickers;-) )
You can use the same thing for decommissioning. You can send a "data kill pill" that lets you remotely wipe the user credentials, but leave the machine operational. This way you can sell a fleet of old laptops without worrying about all your (or your employees) data being sold on the open market.
You can also set up a set of timers, so a laptop can be disabled if it doesn't check into your server for a configurable period of time or there are too many failed password tries. (This is a management server on your corporate network that also lets your admin set policy, see encryption state, last seen date, etc. so you know if a machine was encrypted when it was stolen.)
No government, **AA, or third party can remotely disable the machine without access to the management server. This isn't about big brother, it's about trying to keep your data safe.
None of this is nearly as much fun as some of the comments I've read, but it happens to be true.
Dave, programming the Amiga was a formative experience for me. The elegance of the underlying OS, the hardware cleverness, the graphics primitives, and so on just entranced me. Like many said, it was just a fun computer to work with.
Even now, I still remember the names of a few of the Amiga group, just from reading the developer docs so many times: Jay Miner (of course), RJ Mical, Carl Sassenthrass, Dave Haynie... (probably butchered the spelling of half the names, but I'm too lazy to look them up).
So first, thanks for that...
Second, do you recommend a book (or web site) that best tells the stories from those days and ideally continues through the ups and downs of Amiga Technology? I've always wanted to hear the first person tales from the darkness of Commodore management to the passion of building something new -- you know, a bit more insider-y than "where did the guru meditation come from?"
Thanks for the very fair assessment, and measured response that answers not only the poster's questions but most of the issues raised by others.
One comment: Due to customer feedback like yours, we moved the info and tools for PE disks out of the password protected section of the Knowledge Base (i.e., requiring a paid support agreement) into the public area.
Did you know that PGP WDE isn't officially supported on RAID configurations? I think it says a lot that the product worked in your environment, but a 12-disk RAID 50 configuration isn't exactly the sweet spot for a product targeted at laptop users.
No surprise that performance would be poor given that WDE is neither tested nor optimized for that use case....yes, I work for PGP.
FYI, PGP WDE fully supports WinPE, BartPE, and Windows Recovery Console.
If you need to recover, you can build a BartPE disk with the tools you need, boot from it, authenticate to the corrupted drive, and fully access it for repair or scraping off the data as needed. It's pretty cool.
Regarding an "additional key" -- there's none. Source code is available on the PGP website, and it gets downloaded frequently for crypto review....Yes, I work for PGP.
Seriously, you have a problem either with the hardware configuration, other software, or the OS. Sometimes bad sectors on the HD during the encryption process will cause Windows to downgrade disk access to PIO mode, slowing things way down. Maybe there's some disk indexer running...could be something else.
I run PGP WDE every day, have since a beta of the first product, and what you're seeing is *not* normal....and yes, I work for PGP.
1. Latency. Yeah, that "might" was me saying "will be, but...". Exactly as you say, none of the apps you mention would be appropriate. But who cares, that's what the real internet is for, isn't it? The point is, it's *not* "today's web." Today's web is today's web, and it'll never go away. That doesn't mean something different can't grow up next to it, and evolve in its own way.
2. A wireless mesh would only be usable for low-bandwidth, non-latency-sensitive applications; email and usenet would be about it. Yes, like the original Internet, running over 1200 baud modems? Browsing fits into this category too, though not of the flash- and graphics-heavy style. Frankly though, what interests me most is the new applications that could be created to work within such an environment. More local scripting/AJAXyness to improve responsiveness? Web 3.0? Who knows. Distance yourself from today's capabilities, evolution happens in steps.
3. Nonlocal traffic. No doubt this is a problem. But would you dedicate an unused 5GB of your 200GB drive to help overcome it? Would others? Cache management and locality is a hard problem in a distributed environment, but many have worked on it for a long time and come up with good solutions. Ultimately, maximizing the likely locality of communication is needed for all distributed networks, not just meshes; otherwise, Akamai, Speedera, and regional data centers would be unnecessary.
Overall, they're tough problems, but I find it hard to bet against horny, cheap, pissed-off hackers working under the guise of protecting our civil liberties.
Seems to me that the biggest risk to individual freedoms is transport over centrally/corporate owned lines.
Why not leverage nearly ubiquitous wireless access points (and possibly ad hoc wireless card settings) to create a completely wireless mesh that doesn't even connect to the Internet at all? This would parallel the development of the original 'net, where it starts as a bunch of island networks that get interconnected over time.
Think about it-no phone lines, no centrality, no existing infrastructure. Nothing to "tap", very hard to track. Even better, no infrastructure so it could be built from scratch. IPv6, anonymizing, encrypted.
Imagine a set of open source tools that take the best features of mesh networks and peer-to-peer, running exclusively over home wireless technology. One package could include a complete set of apps to get "on the mesh" including the routing intelligence, a "secure sandbox" for shared files/web pages, a browser, and caching. Run the package, and maybe at first you only connect to another geeky neighbor-but you don't know which. Check out his home-brew page in the browser, poke around the files he put up. As more people come on line, what you can access increases, sometimes dramatically as networks are interconnected.
(Maybe initially the system could tunnel through the internet to connect disparate networks and gain critical mass. At some point this will always be necessary to get across oceans or challenging geographies.)
Chicken and egg problem? You bet. Realistically, the three p's would drive it, as they do many new technologies: porn, piracy and privacy. But the opportunity is there for so much more.
Speed would suck, sure, due to routing inefficiencies. But consider that the average bandwidth would be at 802.11 speeds: minimum 10Mbps, more likely 54Mbps. If I get 3Mbps on my cable line I'm thrilled. Latency might be high, but no one would be running Quake 3 on this. And wireless tech is only getting faster, while mesh routing and caching technologies are only getting smarter.
I really think that if a truly independent, hacker-run next-gen internet will ever exist, it's going to be over home wireless. The entrenched media companies are too aware of the money making opportunities to let the "free ride" on their infrastructure continue forever (even though it's not a free ride, but don't tell them that). Unregulated spectrum is about the only Free space left.
Use it to create a network that's truly decentralized, owned by the people, and anonymous from the ground up and you can change the world.
I'm tired of all these "+5 Insightful" comments about how this is a protection racket.*
Look, insurance is not some crapshoot. It's highly dependent on using statistical analysis to mitigate risks. Stats require data. Insurance companies are ALWAYS trying to get more data to understand the risks they need to hedge against.
Why does the insurance industry fund Underwriter's Laboratory (you know how everything under the sun is "UL Approved"?)? So they understand (and, by engaging in the process, can minimize) the risks associated with using electrical appliances (electrocution, fires, loss or damage). They then price insurance accordingly.
Ideally, an insurance company will contract (or fund) a third-party company to do the analysis. The insurer gets the stats and determines their rates, while the 3rd party works to minimize the risks. The UL label program has dramatically reduced house fires, for example.
This is exactly what's going on here -- OSRM engaged PubPat, a group dedicated to FIGHTING bad patents, to do the analysis. They get their data, while PubPat can work to get those patents invalidated.
There's another benefit here to the Linux community: companies should feel more free to adopt Linux now that the risk is known and there's a way to minimize it (i.e., insurance). Which is more likely to keep you in the house, knowing that if you go outside you can be violently murdered, or that there's a less than 1% chance of being murdered that can be made to almost zero if you avoid certain behaviors?
Put another way: Companies don't mind taking risks (it's what they do), provided that they're identified and can be hedged. Unknown risks that can take down a company, however, are untenable.
Everyone knew that patent suits were a huge risk to Linux, but it was an amorphous big deal that was unquantified. Now it's known. I'm surprised that people who so violently disagree with "security through obscurity" are against the public release of risk information around patents. Understand the problem, make it public, then address it quickly. It's the same situation, just a legal one and not a programming one.
As an aside, this is not to say insurance companies can't be evil -- dropping people after genetic testing shows a proclivity for a disease is just wrong, IMHO. But, economics dictates that if everyone knew exactly what chance they had of contracting diseases, there would be "genetic protection insurance", since no one knows/who/ would get what, when (it's like life insurance -- everyone will die, but no one knows how much money will be paid into insurance before that date. But, statistically you can get a good idea and charge people accordingly. That's where actuarial tables and increasing rates come in. But I digress).
In short, what you're seeing is a responsible insurance company going about their business.
* Full disclosure -- I only read the comments on this article at +5 before writing, so sorry if this is redundant.
Yes, but why couldn't an ISP or web host be a "major client"? Then, all their customers would have encrypted e-mail with no additional product required. Seems like a pretty good solution (no pun intended).
For PGP/GPG to be widely used, major clients must:
* Support automatic key downloading.
* Support automatic encryption/signing.
* Support opportunistic encryption.
* It should be much more transparent than it is today.
"PGP Universal. ..shift[s] the burden of securing email messages and attachments from the desktop to the network in a way that is automatic and entirely transparent to users."
* Two-way policy enforcement
* Automatic and transparent
* Comprehensive and self-managing (automatic key generation)
The more common usage of the term "stigmata" is roughly, "marks or bleeding sores resembling the wounds received by Jesus, spontaneously appearing on the hands, feet, brow and side of very devoted followers."
The picture I linked to is a cactus that looks like a Christian cross. A holy cactus. It has open holes...stomata...stigmata...
Sigh.
By the way, aren't the "little balls that hold the pollen" called "testicles"?
It also includes a picture of the tiny pores on the surface of a cactus leaf, called stomata. ..
Unless the cactus looks like this, then they're called stigmata
(And no, that's no goatse link and I didn't draw it myself -- found it by googling for images of "cactus cross". Once again the unholy alliance of Google and freakish AOLers is there to support an awful pun.)
Hmm, don't want to get you in a slap fight with yourself:), but just to be clear: the $0.50 price was pre-split. The post-split price was $2.00.
You can't "unsplit" a stock that hasn't split yet, if that makes any sense.
Another way to look at it is (in a hugely oversimplified way) stock price=company value/number of shares of stock outstanding.
All a split does is change the shares outstanding--shrink the number in a reverse split, grow it in a traditional split. The company's value doesn't change due to the split, so the stock price is both $2.00 and $0.50, but never $0.125.
Unless when you say "realworld value" you mean, "after the real world realizes SCO has no case, no product, an SEC investigation and a huge civil litigation overhang" then yes, I completely agree.
SCO's real world value will be about 12 cents. But that's total value, not per-share price.:-)
That's a "reverse stock split". The "1:4" means "we give you one new share (at 4x the current price) for four old shares."
Compare it to Microsoft (for example), with their "2:1" split(s). "We give you two new shares at half the current price for your one old share."
Take a look at the historical prices here. The Close column makes it pretty clear.
SCOX needed to do this because of the delisting threat. NASDAQ will delist a company that can't maintain a share price over $1, and SCOX was at $0.50 (+- $0.10).
Sure, while everyone's complaining about the $0.50 price tag per game, only one other person (so far) has mentioned the actual sales cost of the console -- $2,772(!!)
Considering the game itself can be played on a cpu less powerful than that in today's cell phones or children's toys, a 20" TV can be had for $69.99, the rest of the cabinet is particle board and laminate, and there are no incremental R&D costs to amortize, why the hell are they charging so much?
Given the state of arcades in the US, I think they'd sell more if they charged $699 (still a robbery) and went after the niche of geeks wanting one in their living rooms.
That's a good point, but it begs the question: why is there still 911 access on "dead" copper? Because of FCC regulations.
From the phone co's perspective, that costs them money. So shouldn't the VoIP user pay a fee to offset the cost of the phone co providing 911?
If everyone switched to VoIP and relied on existing copper exclusively for 911, the phone companies would go bankrupt.
Oh, wait...;-)
Seriously, I'm *not* in favor of any VoIP regulations. I think it could be warranted, but the risk of the gov't screwing it up and driving the business into the ground is too high. More importantly, having the gov't regulate one type of Internet data is like placing an elephant in clown's shoes on top of a slippery slope.
What's needed is a creative, even-handed, non-politicized solution. Wake me up when that'll happen.
Somehow I doubt that the FCC will "get it" and create a regulatory framework that makes any sense.
However, there are a few good reasons for regulations. Phone service is considered a "lifeline" service. Without it, people can die ("help! I've fallen and I can't get up!"). That's why there are surcharges to support rural phone systems and keep the price down, as well as mandatory 9-1-1 regulations.
Needless to say, taxing VOIP to pay for rural phones doesn't make a lot of sense today, particularly since the rural infrastructure is already built out.
However, most VOIP services don't support 9-1-1 calling, which can be a huge problem in an emergency situation. Reliability is dependent on the underlying ISP, which can be an issue.
The problem is that any regulatory framework needs to balance the needs of the industry to *benefit* the consumer. Granted those benefits may involve a trade-off (pay an extra $10 on the VOIP hardware to support a build-out of 9-1-1 bridges), but the benefit (emergency access) is supposed to be greater than the cost.
Unfortunately, I think most in the government forget that they work for us, and are there to look out for our interests. When the balance is off (more cost than consumer benefit), you get an overly regulated, stifled industry that doesn't provide adequate (or value-added) service to the clients that are paying for the service. More often, the entrenched businesses simply get more entrenched.
I fear that this is the political environment into which the VOIP will descend. There will be more focus on the regulation and less on the value that the regulations will bring to the consumer.
No, the problem is that people are too focused on complaining about the patent system, or trial lawyers, or conflicts of interest, or the legal system. Patents may be slow and expensive, but we're talking about protecting the future. Think about it.
Changing the system will not work, at least in the short term. The patent office won't change. Lawsuits won't be made illegal. Barratry will not be enforced. Lobbyists won't go away. Fighting every patent claim by trying to prove prior art is a losing battle -- some patents will be valid, no matter how much we wish they weren't, and the cost would be insanely prohibitive.
What ever happened to "the best offense is a good defense"? "Fight fire with fire"? Let's play the game under today's rules, while trying to level the playing field for the future, or even tip it in our direction. That's all I'm saying.
Yes, much about the current system sucks. That just means that action needs to be taken to defend against the system, in an acceptable and realistic way. Creating a body of intellectual property that's owned by the open source community is a way of doing that.
Thanks for the links, I admit to being less familiar than I should with the nuances between the free software (Stallman) and the open source advocacy positions.
However, per the Copyleft link, GNU's goal is to "give all users the freedom to redistribute and change GNU software." I'm talking about protecting those freedoms.
When dealing with patents, the license is irrelevant -- except to make it easier to identify infringing code. If Microsoft decided to fight "the free software" (as they put it, subtly slamming Linux and Stallman by adding the word "the") by enforcing every patent in their war chest, things could get very uncomfortable.
They have every right to do this, and I frankly expect them to if market share numbers turn especially ugly. At this point, I don't think open source, free software, or even public domain programs have any recourse.
Everyone bemoans bad patents and the effect they can have on Open Source, but is there an effort to actually *do* anything about it?
One of the most obvious issues with software patents is cross-licensing. If IBM infringes on Intel's patents, Intel sues. IBM does a search, and counter-sues because Intel is infringing on umpteen IBM patents. Voila, a cross-licensing agreement is signed, no one gets sued, everyone's happy.
Needless to say, if an open source application unwittingly infringes on a patent (which is more likely over time), there is little recourse.
Shouldn't the EFF or the FSF be encouraging coders (particularly those doing cutting edge work) to submit "patentable" code much like they recommend assigning copyrights to them?
They should offer to do the patent search and submission in return for all licensing rights. This would give a central (hopefully benevolent) organization a "war chest" of patents for future lawsuit avoidance and cross-licensing.
Is this already being done?
With the amount of work going into Open Source, there must be tons of patentable code out there. Even if it's not patentable, it apparently doesn't really matter.
The views expressed in this document are purely those of the authors and may not, in any circumstances, be interpreted as stating an official position of the European Commission.
The European Commission does not guarantee the accuracy of the information included in this study, nor it accepts any responsibility for any use thereof.
[snip 147 pages]
Appendices - Glossary (cont'd)
X Session: When a user logs in to a computer and runs programs under the X protocol they create and X session.
X Terminal: A terminal specially designed to run an X server which allows users to display the output of programs running on another computer using the X protocol over a network.
Slashdot Mirror
None of this is nearly as much fun as some of the comments I've read, but it happens to be true.
Dave, programming the Amiga was a formative experience for me. The elegance of the underlying OS, the hardware cleverness, the graphics primitives, and so on just entranced me. Like many said, it was just a fun computer to work with.
Even now, I still remember the names of a few of the Amiga group, just from reading the developer docs so many times: Jay Miner (of course), RJ Mical, Carl Sassenthrass, Dave Haynie... (probably butchered the spelling of half the names, but I'm too lazy to look them up).
So first, thanks for that...
Second, do you recommend a book (or web site) that best tells the stories from those days and ideally continues through the ups and downs of Amiga Technology? I've always wanted to hear the first person tales from the darkness of Commodore management to the passion of building something new -- you know, a bit more insider-y than "where did the guru meditation come from?"
Any thoughts?
Thanks for the very fair assessment, and measured response that answers not only the poster's questions but most of the issues raised by others.
One comment: Due to customer feedback like yours, we moved the info and tools for PE disks out of the password protected section of the Knowledge Base (i.e., requiring a paid support agreement) into the public area.
And yes, I work for PGP.
Did you know that PGP WDE isn't officially supported on RAID configurations? I think it says a lot that the product worked in your environment, but a 12-disk RAID 50 configuration isn't exactly the sweet spot for a product targeted at laptop users.
No surprise that performance would be poor given that WDE is neither tested nor optimized for that use case. ...yes, I work for PGP.
FYI, PGP WDE fully supports WinPE, BartPE, and Windows Recovery Console.
If you need to recover, you can build a BartPE disk with the tools you need, boot from it, authenticate to the corrupted drive, and fully access it for repair or scraping off the data as needed. It's pretty cool.
Regarding an "additional key" -- there's none. Source code is available on the PGP website, and it gets downloaded frequently for crypto review. ...Yes, I work for PGP.
Seriously, you have a problem either with the hardware configuration, other software, or the OS. Sometimes bad sectors on the HD during the encryption process will cause Windows to downgrade disk access to PIO mode, slowing things way down. Maybe there's some disk indexer running...could be something else.
I run PGP WDE every day, have since a beta of the first product, and what you're seeing is *not* normal. ...and yes, I work for PGP.
Oh for mod points...
Thanks for the laugh.
Good comment, here's my 2 cents...
1. Latency. Yeah, that "might" was me saying "will be, but...". Exactly as you say, none of the apps you mention would be appropriate. But who cares, that's what the real internet is for, isn't it? The point is, it's *not* "today's web." Today's web is today's web, and it'll never go away. That doesn't mean something different can't grow up next to it, and evolve in its own way.
2. A wireless mesh would only be usable for low-bandwidth, non-latency-sensitive applications; email and usenet would be about it. Yes, like the original Internet, running over 1200 baud modems? Browsing fits into this category too, though not of the flash- and graphics-heavy style. Frankly though, what interests me most is the new applications that could be created to work within such an environment. More local scripting/AJAXyness to improve responsiveness? Web 3.0? Who knows. Distance yourself from today's capabilities, evolution happens in steps.
3. Nonlocal traffic. No doubt this is a problem. But would you dedicate an unused 5GB of your 200GB drive to help overcome it? Would others? Cache management and locality is a hard problem in a distributed environment, but many have worked on it for a long time and come up with good solutions. Ultimately, maximizing the likely locality of communication is needed for all distributed networks, not just meshes; otherwise, Akamai, Speedera, and regional data centers would be unnecessary.
Overall, they're tough problems, but I find it hard to bet against horny, cheap, pissed-off hackers working under the guise of protecting our civil liberties.
Seems to me that the biggest risk to individual freedoms is transport over centrally/corporate owned lines.
Why not leverage nearly ubiquitous wireless access points (and possibly ad hoc wireless card settings) to create a completely wireless mesh that doesn't even connect to the Internet at all? This would parallel the development of the original 'net, where it starts as a bunch of island networks that get interconnected over time.
Think about it-no phone lines, no centrality, no existing infrastructure. Nothing to "tap", very hard to track. Even better, no infrastructure so it could be built from scratch. IPv6, anonymizing, encrypted.
Imagine a set of open source tools that take the best features of mesh networks and peer-to-peer, running exclusively over home wireless technology. One package could include a complete set of apps to get "on the mesh" including the routing intelligence, a "secure sandbox" for shared files/web pages, a browser, and caching. Run the package, and maybe at first you only connect to another geeky neighbor-but you don't know which. Check out his home-brew page in the browser, poke around the files he put up. As more people come on line, what you can access increases, sometimes dramatically as networks are interconnected.
(Maybe initially the system could tunnel through the internet to connect disparate networks and gain critical mass. At some point this will always be necessary to get across oceans or challenging geographies.)
Chicken and egg problem? You bet. Realistically, the three p's would drive it, as they do many new technologies: porn, piracy and privacy. But the opportunity is there for so much more.
Speed would suck, sure, due to routing inefficiencies. But consider that the average bandwidth would be at 802.11 speeds: minimum 10Mbps, more likely 54Mbps. If I get 3Mbps on my cable line I'm thrilled. Latency might be high, but no one would be running Quake 3 on this. And wireless tech is only getting faster, while mesh routing and caching technologies are only getting smarter.
I really think that if a truly independent, hacker-run next-gen internet will ever exist, it's going to be over home wireless. The entrenched media companies are too aware of the money making opportunities to let the "free ride" on their infrastructure continue forever (even though it's not a free ride, but don't tell them that). Unregulated spectrum is about the only Free space left.
Use it to create a network that's truly decentralized, owned by the people, and anonymous from the ground up and you can change the world.
If you do want to see the 1984 commercial, you can find it here: http://www.apple-history.com/frames/body.php?page= gallery&model=1984&format=small
Just in case any one is confused, this is not the Big Brother ad that showed during the Super Bowl.
It's a video of the actual introduction by Jobs at an Apple event.
Screen shots, speech synthesis, Jobs in a bow tie.
Interesting to see what geeks in 1984 cheered at, but that's about it.
I'm tired of all these "+5 Insightful" comments about how this is a protection racket.*
/who/ would get what, when (it's like life insurance -- everyone will die, but no one knows how much money will be paid into insurance before that date. But, statistically you can get a good idea and charge people accordingly. That's where actuarial tables and increasing rates come in. But I digress).
Look, insurance is not some crapshoot. It's highly dependent on using statistical analysis to mitigate risks. Stats require data. Insurance companies are ALWAYS trying to get more data to understand the risks they need to hedge against.
Why does the insurance industry fund Underwriter's Laboratory (you know how everything under the sun is "UL Approved"?)? So they understand (and, by engaging in the process, can minimize) the risks associated with using electrical appliances (electrocution, fires, loss or damage). They then price insurance accordingly.
Ideally, an insurance company will contract (or fund) a third-party company to do the analysis. The insurer gets the stats and determines their rates, while the 3rd party works to minimize the risks. The UL label program has dramatically reduced house fires, for example.
This is exactly what's going on here -- OSRM engaged PubPat, a group dedicated to FIGHTING bad patents, to do the analysis. They get their data, while PubPat can work to get those patents invalidated.
There's another benefit here to the Linux community: companies should feel more free to adopt Linux now that the risk is known and there's a way to minimize it (i.e., insurance). Which is more likely to keep you in the house, knowing that if you go outside you can be violently murdered, or that there's a less than 1% chance of being murdered that can be made to almost zero if you avoid certain behaviors?
Put another way: Companies don't mind taking risks (it's what they do), provided that they're identified and can be hedged. Unknown risks that can take down a company, however, are untenable.
Everyone knew that patent suits were a huge risk to Linux, but it was an amorphous big deal that was unquantified. Now it's known. I'm surprised that people who so violently disagree with "security through obscurity" are against the public release of risk information around patents. Understand the problem, make it public, then address it quickly. It's the same situation, just a legal one and not a programming one.
As an aside, this is not to say insurance companies can't be evil -- dropping people after genetic testing shows a proclivity for a disease is just wrong, IMHO. But, economics dictates that if everyone knew exactly what chance they had of contracting diseases, there would be "genetic protection insurance", since no one knows
In short, what you're seeing is a responsible insurance company going about their business.
* Full disclosure -- I only read the comments on this article at +5 before writing, so sorry if this is redundant.
Yes, but why couldn't an ISP or web host be a "major client"? Then, all their customers would have encrypted e-mail with no additional product required. Seems like a pretty good solution (no pun intended).
For PGP/GPG to be widely used, major clients must:
* Support automatic key downloading.
* Support automatic encryption/signing.
* Support opportunistic encryption.
* It should be much more transparent than it is today.
You mean like this?
"PGP Universal. . .shift[s] the burden of securing email messages and attachments from the desktop to the network in a way that is automatic and entirely transparent to users."
* Two-way policy enforcement
* Automatic and transparent
* Comprehensive and self-managing (automatic key generation)
I was just making a bad pun.
The more common usage of the term "stigmata" is roughly, "marks or bleeding sores resembling the wounds received by Jesus, spontaneously appearing on the hands, feet, brow and side of very devoted followers."
The picture I linked to is a cactus that looks like a Christian cross. A holy cactus. It has open holes...stomata...stigmata...
Sigh.
By the way, aren't the "little balls that hold the pollen" called "testicles"?
It also includes a picture of the tiny pores on the surface of a cactus leaf, called stomata. . .
Unless the cactus looks like this, then they're called stigmata
(And no, that's no goatse link and I didn't draw it myself -- found it by googling for images of "cactus cross". Once again the unholy alliance of Google and freakish AOLers is there to support an awful pun.)
Hmm, don't want to get you in a slap fight with yourself :), but just to be clear: the $0.50 price was pre-split. The post-split price was $2.00.
:-)
You can't "unsplit" a stock that hasn't split yet, if that makes any sense.
Another way to look at it is (in a hugely oversimplified way) stock price=company value/number of shares of stock outstanding.
All a split does is change the shares outstanding--shrink the number in a reverse split, grow it in a traditional split. The company's value doesn't change due to the split, so the stock price is both $2.00 and $0.50, but never $0.125.
Unless when you say "realworld value" you mean, "after the real world realizes SCO has no case, no product, an SEC investigation and a huge civil litigation overhang" then yes, I completely agree.
SCO's real world value will be about 12 cents. But that's total value, not per-share price.
That's a "reverse stock split". The "1:4" means "we give you one new share (at 4x the current price) for four old shares."
Compare it to Microsoft (for example), with their "2:1" split(s). "We give you two new shares at half the current price for your one old share."
Take a look at the historical prices here. The Close column makes it pretty clear.
SCOX needed to do this because of the delisting threat. NASDAQ will delist a company that can't maintain a share price over $1, and SCOX was at $0.50 (+- $0.10).
No coincidence here at all.
Sure, while everyone's complaining about the $0.50 price tag per game, only one other person (so far) has mentioned the actual sales cost of the console -- $2,772(!!)
Considering the game itself can be played on a cpu less powerful than that in today's cell phones or children's toys, a 20" TV can be had for $69.99, the rest of the cabinet is particle board and laminate, and there are no incremental R&D costs to amortize, why the hell are they charging so much?
Given the state of arcades in the US, I think they'd sell more if they charged $699 (still a robbery) and went after the niche of geeks wanting one in their living rooms.
This is ridiculous.
That's a good point, but it begs the question: why is there still 911 access on "dead" copper? Because of FCC regulations.
;-)
From the phone co's perspective, that costs them money. So shouldn't the VoIP user pay a fee to offset the cost of the phone co providing 911?
If everyone switched to VoIP and relied on existing copper exclusively for 911, the phone companies would go bankrupt.
Oh, wait...
Seriously, I'm *not* in favor of any VoIP regulations. I think it could be warranted, but the risk of the gov't screwing it up and driving the business into the ground is too high. More importantly, having the gov't regulate one type of Internet data is like placing an elephant in clown's shoes on top of a slippery slope.
What's needed is a creative, even-handed, non-politicized solution. Wake me up when that'll happen.
Somehow I doubt that the FCC will "get it" and create a regulatory framework that makes any sense.
However, there are a few good reasons for regulations. Phone service is considered a "lifeline" service. Without it, people can die ("help! I've fallen and I can't get up!"). That's why there are surcharges to support rural phone systems and keep the price down, as well as mandatory 9-1-1 regulations.
Needless to say, taxing VOIP to pay for rural phones doesn't make a lot of sense today, particularly since the rural infrastructure is already built out.
However, most VOIP services don't support 9-1-1 calling, which can be a huge problem in an emergency situation. Reliability is dependent on the underlying ISP, which can be an issue.
The problem is that any regulatory framework needs to balance the needs of the industry to *benefit* the consumer. Granted those benefits may involve a trade-off (pay an extra $10 on the VOIP hardware to support a build-out of 9-1-1 bridges), but the benefit (emergency access) is supposed to be greater than the cost.
Unfortunately, I think most in the government forget that they work for us, and are there to look out for our interests. When the balance is off (more cost than consumer benefit), you get an overly regulated, stifled industry that doesn't provide adequate (or value-added) service to the clients that are paying for the service. More often, the entrenched businesses simply get more entrenched.
I fear that this is the political environment into which the VOIP will descend. There will be more focus on the regulation and less on the value that the regulations will bring to the consumer.
No, the problem is that people are too focused on complaining about the patent system, or trial lawyers, or conflicts of interest, or the legal system. Patents may be slow and expensive, but we're talking about protecting the future. Think about it.
Changing the system will not work, at least in the short term. The patent office won't change. Lawsuits won't be made illegal. Barratry will not be enforced. Lobbyists won't go away. Fighting every patent claim by trying to prove prior art is a losing battle -- some patents will be valid, no matter how much we wish they weren't, and the cost would be insanely prohibitive.
What ever happened to "the best offense is a good defense"? "Fight fire with fire"? Let's play the game under today's rules, while trying to level the playing field for the future, or even tip it in our direction. That's all I'm saying.
Yes, much about the current system sucks. That just means that action needs to be taken to defend against the system, in an acceptable and realistic way. Creating a body of intellectual property that's owned by the open source community is a way of doing that.
Thanks for the links, I admit to being less familiar than I should with the nuances between the free software (Stallman) and the open source advocacy positions.
However, per the Copyleft link, GNU's goal is to "give all users the freedom to redistribute and change GNU software." I'm talking about protecting those freedoms.
When dealing with patents, the license is irrelevant -- except to make it easier to identify infringing code. If Microsoft decided to fight "the free software" (as they put it, subtly slamming Linux and Stallman by adding the word "the") by enforcing every patent in their war chest, things could get very uncomfortable.
They have every right to do this, and I frankly expect them to if market share numbers turn especially ugly. At this point, I don't think open source, free software, or even public domain programs have any recourse.
Everyone bemoans bad patents and the effect they can have on Open Source, but is there an effort to actually *do* anything about it?
One of the most obvious issues with software patents is cross-licensing. If IBM infringes on Intel's patents, Intel sues. IBM does a search, and counter-sues because Intel is infringing on umpteen IBM patents. Voila, a cross-licensing agreement is signed, no one gets sued, everyone's happy.
Needless to say, if an open source application unwittingly infringes on a patent (which is more likely over time), there is little recourse.
Shouldn't the EFF or the FSF be encouraging coders (particularly those doing cutting edge work) to submit "patentable" code much like they recommend assigning copyrights to them?
They should offer to do the patent search and submission in return for all licensing rights. This would give a central (hopefully benevolent) organization a "war chest" of patents for future lawsuit avoidance and cross-licensing.
Is this already being done?
With the amount of work going into Open Source, there must be tons of patentable code out there. Even if it's not patentable, it apparently doesn't really matter.
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