So IMNO the fact that he made the statement at all meets the above definition of a FUD attack.
Uhhh, actually, the interviewer brought it up and Ballmer avoided the question without limiting his options by committing to a course of action. "No, we aren't suing anyone (but that doesn't mean we can't.)"
From what I read of their behavior, it seems to be an unwritten policy of theirs to only file defensive patents.
I thought Slashdot editors were supposed to be technically savvy. How does this story pass their bullshit detector?
60% rewritten is an impossibly bogus number.
Given infinite money it would still take about a decade to rewrite 60% of a modern day OS. Any halfway decent programmer knows this, and Microsoft absolutely would know this.
And you thought calling it 'Office 2007' was just to make it seem all future-like -- but according to eWEEK.com's Mary Jo Foley, turns out calling it is truth in advertising: Office 2007 won't ship until 2007. What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
I'll take a stab at this...
What will it do to Microsoft's reputation? Nothing.
Office managers have more time to plan upgrades/budgets.
Then you don't understand DNS resolvers. Did you bother reading the linked site? All you need to do is query an open resolver with some domain you set up (ex my.span.com), then change the authoritiative DNS of your registered domain as the target open DNS resolver. Now whenever someone anywhere in the world queries for my.spam.com, it hits your DNS server (until their local server caches it). It looks like you are hosting the spammer.
No, the problem was that I did read the article and was utterly confused by their description of the flaw.
From what I understand of DNS resolvers, this attack can't work unless there's another compromise at play here. Either a compromise of one of the victim host's zones, or a compromise of the servers hosting the open resolvers themselves.
"Applications that arrive in damaged form are customarily transferred to an electronic format, he said -- often by machine. So it's possible a human being never handled the taped-up application and never had the chance to spot the obvious sign of trouble."
What, a machine opened the letter, recognized it was an application (and not, say, other junkmail that got stuffed into the nearest bulk reply envelope), fed it into a scanner, then trashed the hard copy? At no point in the process does a human see it? Sounds like bullshit.
When does Samsung roll out a gaming console? They've been thinking about it. We've been waiting for it. What's the holdup?
However, I really don't dig the idea of being wrapped in music while I'm out in public. I like to be aware of my surroundings since I usually have a good time when I am. Here's some Vonnegut:
(talking about when he tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
The driver gets written, the company has no reverse-engineerer to sue.
A bit late now though since you brought attention to yourself via Slashdot. You could probably even count on getting sued if it is ever reverse engineered by someone else even if you had nothing to do with it.
"The 1841 sea level benchmark (centre) on the `Isle of the Dead', Tasmania. According to Antarctic explorer, Capt. Sir James Clark Ross, it marked mean sea level in 1841. Photo taken at low tide 20 Jan 2004.
Mark is 50 cm across; tidal range is less than a metre."
Actually, by definition, anyone who pays to send you a certified mail has just got to be someone whose list you actively opted-in to.
Actually, there's nothing in the technology that guarantees this on a per-user basis.
Each message sent through the Goodmail CertifiedEmail service is embedded with a cryptographically-secure token. When a token is detected by a participating ISP, the message is delivered directly to a recipient's inbox and identified as a CertifiedEmail message.
Sounds like the sender registers with AOL, not with the AOL member.
AOL might do this with double opt-in mailing lists, but there's presumably nothing to stop them from allowing advertisers or anyone from sending you unblockable junk. The kind of junk you'd most want to be able to block.
If the state's not abusing its authority, it would have no problem with due process.
A lone criminal will have to work very hard to take what they want from me. I can take steps to defend myself. We are both just lone human beings. It's anyone's guess what will happen.
But a criminal working in government can bring enormous violent resources against me to take what they want. I can defend myself from one or maybe a few men, but an entire police force? An army? An all-knowing intelligence agency? I don't stand a chance.
This is why government should be heavily restricted. A proper government should be incapable of harming non-criminals, even if it's in the hands of your worst enemy.
Maybe you trust the Bush administration with the totalitarian power it is trying to assert, but imagine if Hillary Clinton or Pat Robertson or Michael Moore became President. How would you feel about the power at their disposal now?
Due process is what keeps Michael Moore from gettng elected to office and throwing you in jail for shopping at Wal-Mart.
What would have been the advantage of using Linux for the past three years instead of Mac OS X, even under the brutal worst-case regime I described above? I really don't get it.
This is exactly what I am addressing. The people who run Linux fall into roughly two camps. A) The people who hate Windows and saw MacOS as some kind of joke. B) The people who really depend on Linux and its environment of hacker-as-customer-#1 mentality.
There are a lot more of A, and when MacOS stopped sucking, finally, they immediately switched. This movement of type A moving to MacOS while type B stayed still raised a lot of questions: why aren't you moving to Mac? Questions I still get today, years later.
It's exactly the environment around MacOS X that makes it unsuitable for the type Bs. And it makes sense, there's so few of them. As Neal Stephenson said, the day [a software vendor] made a product he wanted to use was the day he shorted their stock, because he is a market of one.
Apple knifing source code releases is a symptom of where their concerns lie. It's not for hackers (which is good, if they want to keep making money), so will everyone please stop pretending it is?
OH MY GOD, REALLY? I HAD NO IDEA. Oh, right, NOW I remember. Steve Jobs' attempt to manipulate Linus's insecurities totally failed, so they knifed the mkLinux project and looked for more willing cocksuckers at the FreeBSD project.
Exactly why I resisted the pressure to abandon Linux for MacOS X on the desktop. It's not Linux with a better UI, it's a proprietary system with candy coating.
Except in limited cases, big companies don't innovate on their own. It's too freaking expensive, which makes it even riskier than it is for the garage/basement innovators.
It's a much better strategy for big companies to acquire small innovative companies.
The proper, educated, Victorian type wanders into a so-called ghetto one day by mistake, hears the kids speak, can't understand anything that was said. The type leaves the so-called ghetto confused and alarmed.
What's the mental chain reaction that follows from here? Initial insecurity ("Why couldn't I understand those black kids talk? Aren't I educated enough?") followed by early rationalization? ("They probably can't understand each other either. Maybe black kids are stupid?"), fear that they might be racists ("Oh my god, am I a racist for thinking they're stupid?!") and finally revised rationalization ("No, of course not, they're not stupid because they're black. They're just poor and undereducated, not like me who is very educated. It's a good thing I'm not a racist anymore. Now, if only they could learn speak properly, they might get out of their mess...")
And so begins another social agenda.
Except here, replace negrophobia with netphobia.
(If the word "negrophobia" has a social movement attached to it, I'm not alluding to it. I just pulled the word out of my ass.)
I am amazed that people do not see Google's action for what it is -- a huge and hugely inexpensive public relations stunt. From a legal standpoint, Google does not have much ground to stand on. Yahoo and Microsoft realized this and that is why they complied. However, from a public relations point of view, it costs Google a small handful of hours of legal time and in return, Google gets featured on Slashdot and the countries newspapers, television and radio outlets, in addition to all over the internet numerous times. In the vast majority of cases, Google will be featured as the do-gooder ("do no evil") standing up to the U.S. Government on the public's behalf meanwhile making its competitors (Yahoo and Microsoft) look bad in the public eye.
I can just imagine Google's competitors being similarly subpeona'd and making the business case to cooperate with the government solely in the hopes that their cooperation forces Google's cooperation. Google's the market leader in search, their competitors have a lot more to gain by giving up their secrets in exchange for Google's secrets. (In fact, if you want to conjecture^2, this may even be why Yahoo! announced recently that they don't want to compete in search.)
Maybe we shouldn't be commending Google for taking a principled stand (which it isn't), but condemning Microsoft and friends for folding so easily. They had every right to refuse, the government is fishing for scientifically useless data from totally unrelated parties.
The judge should be able to see that their competitors complied to gain access to Google's trade secrets, and that their compliance does not validate the government's request, but this may be of no concern to the court.
Such cameras are costly, Houston Mayor Bill White said, "but on the other hand we spend an awful lot for patrol presence." He called the chief's proposal a "brainstorm" rather than a decision.
This is so common now that no one questions it, but why exactly do police need to be on patrol?
When a real crime occurs, it gets reported to the police. There's a community outcry, and if its credible, the police can ask to be empowered to pursue justice, and if the judge agrees, they bring in suspects and evidence and put the pieces together. If the case is still credible, it goes to trial. Due process at work. If a crime hasn't occured, you simply don't see the police. There's no patrol required, they can do this noble job hanging out at the station all day waiting for the phone to ring.
But putting police on the street to be on the "lookout" for crime is a draconian line that was crossed long ago and is now taken for granted. Frequently the crimes they pick up are never reported to them, they're crimes the police see on their own. Crimes like driving without a seatbelt buckled, or an exchange of goods or services that the state does not agree with. Essentially, victimless crimes. And these instances are the ones most abused: cause to question the black kid who wandered into the white neighborhood, mugging motorists as a form of state revenue, etc.
In an ideal world, we could have full faith in the police and allow them to simply point to someone and say "guilty" and have them locked up forever. But the police are only human, and can be corrupted, and that's a dangerous amount of power to give anyone, so we make rules and processes that are checked by one another, and decentralized, to protect us from the police.
So maybe when the police say "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide", we should respond with "if you aren't trying to abuse your authority, you should have no problem with due process".
I find that in the mornings I'm prepared for all out war. Take on the big fish, sue the bastards who need suing, fight for every last dime that's mine, buy low sell high, haggle with the insurance company for lower premiums, uphold civil liberties, take the principled stand.
At night? Be cautious. Don't make noise. Try to work things out amicably.
Or just surrender. Run from the fights. Sure, you can search my bag, officer.
Knowing that I am this way, how can I make any decision at all that I can live with? Just bust a fuck-it, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
So IMNO the fact that he made the statement at all meets the above definition of a FUD attack.
Uhhh, actually, the interviewer brought it up and Ballmer avoided the question without limiting his options by committing to a course of action. "No, we aren't suing anyone (but that doesn't mean we can't.)"
From what I read of their behavior, it seems to be an unwritten policy of theirs to only file defensive patents.
and built much of the OS from scratch
Whoever told you that part is full of shit.
Sorry to break it to you.
I thought Slashdot editors were supposed to be technically savvy. How does this story pass their bullshit detector?
60% rewritten is an impossibly bogus number.
Given infinite money it would still take about a decade to rewrite 60% of a modern day OS. Any halfway decent programmer knows this, and Microsoft absolutely would know this.
Propogating this report is just irresponsible.
And you thought calling it 'Office 2007' was just to make it seem all future-like -- but according to eWEEK.com's Mary Jo Foley, turns out calling it is truth in advertising: Office 2007 won't ship until 2007. What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
I'll take a stab at this...
Then you don't understand DNS resolvers. Did you bother reading the linked site? All you need to do is query an open resolver with some domain you set up (ex my.span.com), then change the authoritiative DNS of your registered domain as the target open DNS resolver. Now whenever someone anywhere in the world queries for my.spam.com, it hits your DNS server (until their local server caches it). It looks like you are hosting the spammer.
No, the problem was that I did read the article and was utterly confused by their description of the flaw.
From what I understand of DNS resolvers, this attack can't work unless there's another compromise at play here. Either a compromise of one of the victim host's zones, or a compromise of the servers hosting the open resolvers themselves.
"Applications that arrive in damaged form are customarily transferred to an electronic format, he said -- often by machine. So it's possible a human being never handled the taped-up application and never had the chance to spot the obvious sign of trouble."
What, a machine opened the letter, recognized it was an application (and not, say, other junkmail that got stuffed into the nearest bulk reply envelope), fed it into a scanner, then trashed the hard copy? At no point in the process does a human see it? Sounds like bullshit.
I have to echo your sentiments, Samsung rules.
When does Samsung roll out a gaming console? They've been thinking about it. We've been waiting for it. What's the holdup?
However, I really don't dig the idea of being wrapped in music while I'm out in public. I like to be aware of my surroundings since I usually have a good time when I am. Here's some Vonnegut:
The driver gets written, the company has no reverse-engineerer to sue.
A bit late now though since you brought attention to yourself via Slashdot. You could probably even count on getting sued if it is ever reverse engineered by someone else even if you had nothing to do with it.
Wait till I post this to usenet!
You have anything based on science.
Do you? (All I see is a whole lot of correlation and not much causation.)
"The 1841 sea level benchmark (centre) on the `Isle of the Dead', Tasmania. According to Antarctic explorer, Capt. Sir James Clark Ross, it marked mean sea level in 1841. Photo taken at low tide 20 Jan 2004. Mark is 50 cm across; tidal range is less than a metre."
See photos to go with caption.
Actually, by definition, anyone who pays to send you a certified mail has just got to be someone whose list you actively opted-in to.
Actually, there's nothing in the technology that guarantees this on a per-user basis.
Sounds like the sender registers with AOL, not with the AOL member.
AOL might do this with double opt-in mailing lists, but there's presumably nothing to stop them from allowing advertisers or anyone from sending you unblockable junk. The kind of junk you'd most want to be able to block.
Anyone who pays AOL to send me a certified email has just got to be someone I don't want to talk to.
Fuck. I've been trolled. I have lost. Have a nice day.
If the state's not abusing its authority, it would have no problem with due process.
A lone criminal will have to work very hard to take what they want from me. I can take steps to defend myself. We are both just lone human beings. It's anyone's guess what will happen.
But a criminal working in government can bring enormous violent resources against me to take what they want. I can defend myself from one or maybe a few men, but an entire police force? An army? An all-knowing intelligence agency? I don't stand a chance.
This is why government should be heavily restricted. A proper government should be incapable of harming non-criminals, even if it's in the hands of your worst enemy.
Maybe you trust the Bush administration with the totalitarian power it is trying to assert, but imagine if Hillary Clinton or Pat Robertson or Michael Moore became President. How would you feel about the power at their disposal now?
Due process is what keeps Michael Moore from gettng elected to office and throwing you in jail for shopping at Wal-Mart.
What would have been the advantage of using Linux for the past three years instead of Mac OS X, even under the brutal worst-case regime I described above? I really don't get it.
This is exactly what I am addressing. The people who run Linux fall into roughly two camps. A) The people who hate Windows and saw MacOS as some kind of joke. B) The people who really depend on Linux and its environment of hacker-as-customer-#1 mentality.
There are a lot more of A, and when MacOS stopped sucking, finally, they immediately switched. This movement of type A moving to MacOS while type B stayed still raised a lot of questions: why aren't you moving to Mac? Questions I still get today, years later.
It's exactly the environment around MacOS X that makes it unsuitable for the type Bs. And it makes sense, there's so few of them. As Neal Stephenson said, the day [a software vendor] made a product he wanted to use was the day he shorted their stock, because he is a market of one.
Apple knifing source code releases is a symptom of where their concerns lie. It's not for hackers (which is good, if they want to keep making money), so will everyone please stop pretending it is?
BSD actually, not Linux.
OH MY GOD, REALLY? I HAD NO IDEA. Oh, right, NOW I remember. Steve Jobs' attempt to manipulate Linus's insecurities totally failed, so they knifed the mkLinux project and looked for more willing cocksuckers at the FreeBSD project.
Sorry about the confusion.
Exactly why I resisted the pressure to abandon Linux for MacOS X on the desktop. It's not Linux with a better UI, it's a proprietary system with candy coating.
And its true colors finally come out.
Will the cool hackers still dig it?
Except in limited cases, big companies don't innovate on their own. It's too freaking expensive, which makes it even riskier than it is for the garage/basement innovators.
It's a much better strategy for big companies to acquire small innovative companies.
The proper, educated, Victorian type wanders into a so-called ghetto one day by mistake, hears the kids speak, can't understand anything that was said. The type leaves the so-called ghetto confused and alarmed.
What's the mental chain reaction that follows from here? Initial insecurity ("Why couldn't I understand those black kids talk? Aren't I educated enough?") followed by early rationalization? ("They probably can't understand each other either. Maybe black kids are stupid?"), fear that they might be racists ("Oh my god, am I a racist for thinking they're stupid?!") and finally revised rationalization ("No, of course not, they're not stupid because they're black. They're just poor and undereducated, not like me who is very educated. It's a good thing I'm not a racist anymore. Now, if only they could learn speak properly, they might get out of their mess...")
And so begins another social agenda.
Except here, replace negrophobia with netphobia.
(If the word "negrophobia" has a social movement attached to it, I'm not alluding to it. I just pulled the word out of my ass.)
I am amazed that people do not see Google's action for what it is -- a huge and hugely inexpensive public relations stunt. From a legal standpoint, Google does not have much ground to stand on. Yahoo and Microsoft realized this and that is why they complied. However, from a public relations point of view, it costs Google a small handful of hours of legal time and in return, Google gets featured on Slashdot and the countries newspapers, television and radio outlets, in addition to all over the internet numerous times. In the vast majority of cases, Google will be featured as the do-gooder ("do no evil") standing up to the U.S. Government on the public's behalf meanwhile making its competitors (Yahoo and Microsoft) look bad in the public eye.
I can just imagine Google's competitors being similarly subpeona'd and making the business case to cooperate with the government solely in the hopes that their cooperation forces Google's cooperation. Google's the market leader in search, their competitors have a lot more to gain by giving up their secrets in exchange for Google's secrets. (In fact, if you want to conjecture^2, this may even be why Yahoo! announced recently that they don't want to compete in search.)
Maybe we shouldn't be commending Google for taking a principled stand (which it isn't), but condemning Microsoft and friends for folding so easily. They had every right to refuse, the government is fishing for scientifically useless data from totally unrelated parties.
The judge should be able to see that their competitors complied to gain access to Google's trade secrets, and that their compliance does not validate the government's request, but this may be of no concern to the court.
Such cameras are costly, Houston Mayor Bill White said, "but on the other hand we spend an awful lot for patrol presence." He called the chief's proposal a "brainstorm" rather than a decision.
This is so common now that no one questions it, but why exactly do police need to be on patrol?
When a real crime occurs, it gets reported to the police. There's a community outcry, and if its credible, the police can ask to be empowered to pursue justice, and if the judge agrees, they bring in suspects and evidence and put the pieces together. If the case is still credible, it goes to trial. Due process at work. If a crime hasn't occured, you simply don't see the police. There's no patrol required, they can do this noble job hanging out at the station all day waiting for the phone to ring.
But putting police on the street to be on the "lookout" for crime is a draconian line that was crossed long ago and is now taken for granted. Frequently the crimes they pick up are never reported to them, they're crimes the police see on their own. Crimes like driving without a seatbelt buckled, or an exchange of goods or services that the state does not agree with. Essentially, victimless crimes. And these instances are the ones most abused: cause to question the black kid who wandered into the white neighborhood, mugging motorists as a form of state revenue, etc.
In an ideal world, we could have full faith in the police and allow them to simply point to someone and say "guilty" and have them locked up forever. But the police are only human, and can be corrupted, and that's a dangerous amount of power to give anyone, so we make rules and processes that are checked by one another, and decentralized, to protect us from the police.
So maybe when the police say "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide", we should respond with "if you aren't trying to abuse your authority, you should have no problem with due process".
Not quite the same ring to it, huh? :(
I find that in the mornings I'm prepared for all out war. Take on the big fish, sue the bastards who need suing, fight for every last dime that's mine, buy low sell high, haggle with the insurance company for lower premiums, uphold civil liberties, take the principled stand.
At night? Be cautious. Don't make noise. Try to work things out amicably. Or just surrender. Run from the fights. Sure, you can search my bag, officer.
Knowing that I am this way, how can I make any decision at all that I can live with? Just bust a fuck-it, I guess.
I guess.