1. . How much responsibility does the owner of an Internet-connected computer have for crimes committed using their equipment,
A user who permits his computer to be used as a tool for attacking another computer/web site / network should be held responsible for maintaining an "attractive nuisance". Users aren't going to be motivated to do even the simple things with respect to security unless they are held responsible. If he's liable for $100 in damages due to the party he let his computer attack for each malware file sent, he's got an incentive to find out what "best practices" are, especially if that's an explicit defense against that kind of lawsuit.
A warning is adequate for a first offense. If somebody has to haul their ass into court to answer for the 50,000 copies of the latest Windows virus they sent me, even if there isn't a cash penalty, they'll take complaints seriously next time before they get into a courtroom, especially when the judge tells him fix your computer or next time,it's $100(USD) per virus or whatever.
And if this persuades people that the Net is too difficult or dangerous to use, that's probably a good thing.
what are ways we can best determine their involvement, or lack of it, in said crimes?
That is what a forensic analysis of a user's computer is supposed to do. Erased files are easy to find. Even overwritten files can be found with the right kind of hard drive recovery tools.
just don't get it. Large scale-piracy outfits have access to large commercial presses, hence their being able to put out CDs that look just like the real thing. They sure as hell don't use burners, so all this copy protection is useless in combatting large-scale organised piracy.
Organized piracy isn't a threat to their monopoly.
The ability to transfer music tracks in a format comparable to FM broadcast quality via Internet makes mass promo theoretically available to "just anybody". That is a threat to their monopoly.
The eventual goal with DRM seems to be to make it impossible to pull multimedia content off the Net that isn't "blessed" by a major content provider.
Once again someone is going about feeding a huge number of consumers ( the human population ) with centralized sources. Although this is convient it does not scale.
Whether it is done in orbit or done on the moon, it scales quite easily. You want more power? Tell the 'bots to fabricate more solar cells. The transmitter automatically joins the rest of the array when placed.
Why not put solar panels on everyones house. Or on the top of building and have them feed battery array.
You want solar on your rooftop? Go buy it. It'll be about $10K including panels, battery banks, and inverter-AC line interface. In a few years, the batteries wear out, in a few more years, the solar cells wear out.
With a space-based service, many of the wear mechanisms terrestrial solar cell power systems simply don't exist, and if cells wear out, the robotic factory can automatically replace them in any case. Perhaps the capital investment is as much as $1K / household and that buys us the start of an industrial scale space infrastructure. Lots of things that can be done with that. Would the price of compute power be impacted if price of the raw material, semiconductor-grade silicon were to drop by 10x or so? What about zero-G crystal fabrication?
Microwaves power is such a cool, but stupid idea. Kind of line nuclear power. Lets create a really expensive solution that leave nuclear waste for our kids to deal with, great....think outside the box people.
Nuclear waste from a solar cell array on the moon or in orbit? You a troll or an idiot?
Did some rich alumnus with a brother-in-law lean on the Princeton school administration to find him a job?
"manager of technology strategy and outreach" sounds like "promotion" to the point where he can't screw up anything anybody depends on. He doesn't exactly sound like the kind of guy I'd ask "Are we better off converting to VoIP or should we wait for a while longer?" or "should we move our Oracle database onto Linux servers?"
My guess is that he's got an office and a secretary, he reports in when he feels like it and occasionally writes reports that get thrown into the garbage unread. And he wrote the article on "company time" for lack of anything better to do. Judging from what I read in his article, I suspect his secretary even handles his e-mail for him because he's "above" (read can't handle) such mundane tasks.
Can anyone who actually knows what goes on at Princeton tell us if this guy actually responsible for any actual systems or networks?
I know that in at least 1 EU nation, the request to examine voting machine and vote counting software was responded to by "Oops, the foriegn company forgot to give us a copy."
Sequoia Voting Systems Inc.
Ownership: Eighty-five percent De La Rue, 15 percent Jefferson Smurfit Group; Smurfs are in the process of selling to Madison Dearborn Partners of Chicago.
* = Sequoia bought Business Records Corporation's optical scan vote tabulation business as part of a 1997 Dept. of Justice anti-trust action with ES&S ? under a licensing agreement, both companies used the same equipment and software.
OK, I goofed with respect to Sequoia. I think my confusion was based on Diebold/Sequoia using the same hardware. My apologies to anybody at either the McCarthy Group companies or Sequoia who find their public association embarrassing.
With respect to the shared hardware, I recommend to Sequoia that they hire some reasonably honest second or third year EE and CS students to design and build some voting machines whose accuracy might be considered believable. Recording and counting votes honestly is NOT rocket science.
They might find it profitable to go Open Source; as they might be able to both differentiate their product and charge premium prices for a product whose honesty and accuracy nobody argues about, assuming that there is a market for honest voting machines and vote tabulation equipment.
I've seen quite a few articles by Enderle mentioning Linux. I've never seen one in which he doesn't bash either Linux or the Linux community or both.
There are things wrong with Linux, but I doubt that Enderle knows what they are.
I keep wondering if he's on Waggener Edstrom's payroll (MS's PR firm) as well as getting a check from whoever it is that mistakes his pieces for objective journalism. Or perhaps he himself is one of these evil zealots he keeps warning us about. Of the Microsoft variety.
Don't know, but I doubt I'll be reading any of his articles again regardless of whether slashdot links to it or not. If I want to read a MS press release, I can find any number of real press releases on the Microsoft site.
If ICANN can't make Verisign go away in the interests of providing a reliable Internet (no more "sitefinder") and ethically run registration (remember the phony domain renewal postcards?) setup, just what the hell are they good for?
They demanded authority to control the root servers, they got it, we who own domains are paying directly. What the hell are we getting for our money?
Start with this article from Bloomberg News for background.
To get dates of insider stock sales, go to the SEC site and go to the EDGAR links.
Then, just pop over to the SCO company site for their press releases announcing various and sundry things that can be expected to increase stock prices.
Draw your own conclusions. You should find some. . . interesting coincidences.
Where everything works, outsource enough core business processes and the vendor is going to wonder sooner or later, just what value the US-based management who is increasingly no longer in touch with the end users is adding to the company products now made in India or China. And wonder why they don't provide this value themselves and keep all the profits, not just markup on hourly rates.
I am indeed expecting a shakeout. However, I don't expect the jobs to return to America as a result, I'm expecting most companies either to go terminal or go completely overseas.
At every Conference Board of Canada event, it is customary that the chair offers a recap of each day's presentations the following morning. On Day 2 of this week's Business Process Outsourcing event those responsibilities fell to Blake Hanna, a partner with Accenture in Toronto, who tried to whittle down a series of presentations into a few bullet points. When he was finished he asked the audience if any key issues hadn't been addressed so far. A hand went up.
"I didn't get the impression anyone was saving any money," one guy said.
This was a great comment, because it went straight to the heart of why many people had probably registered for this conference. The best response came from one of the previous day's presenters, Scotia Group vice-president of strategic sourcing Linda Tuck Chapman, who said many enterprises say they expect cost savings of 30 per cent or more from outsourcing. "I don't know where these comments come from," she said. "Sometimes we've managed to see savings of 10 per cent or a little bit more, but it's usually been much more about the value (outsourcing) brings to the company."
------------ end quote
If you aren't a PHM, you should know that hourly rate isn't the only cost involved in outsourcing. It may not even be the most important. Infrastructure costs. Remember, part of why it's cheaper is that the infrastructure isn't all there. Third World phone lines. Electricity that works sometimes. How big are your outsourcer's generators? Oversight costs. Costs of analyzing your processes well enough to allow exporting them.
Plus, if you didn't adequately spec what you're paying for, for any reason, you're hosed when you get the products back, there may not have been money to do it right but there will be money to do it over. Or the company dies right there.
So why do this? Part of it is... PHMs look at labor costs and don't look any further. Part is... if one is planning to cook the books to reflect a profit that really isn't there, if you can talk about savings from outsourcing, people won't look too hard for further explanations.
Probably the Monkeyboy rock video made by a friendly, helpful Mac user. Sorry, don't have the URL offhand... but if MS wants to see just how far they can possibly go to make MS "cool" and how little it will get them, THEY need to find a copy.
If they're visibly obvious, any decent graphics app can be used to zap them out, and several people here have pointed out automated methods to get rid of them.
If they actually want to catch pirates, lots of ways to digitally watermark an image.
Or just stego the name/address of the intended recipient into the digital track.
If during a court hearing, the stego decrypt app is run, having a nice image with the name and address of the person being tried show up in what all parties agree is the content whose misuse is the subject of the dispute will be. . . very convincing.
Convenience, perhaps. The ability to offer CD-quality sound. (if you think that's offered by iTunes or WMA, get your hearing checked)
But few consumers now are going to buy the horseshit that we should actually pay for broadcast-quality content without some sort of value-add to the material.
Their options are to come up with something better or fail miserably.
If they think a failure and using the law amd the courts and attacking their best customers to protect their content and distribution monopoly will help them, their dropping profits and declining stock prices are telling quite another story.
Why is lawyer consistently at the bottom of the list of respected professions?
Amazingly enough, bar associations have actually paid money to pollsters to answer questions like that.
However, there is one lawyer who need never do this again. Saundra Brown Armstrong can just look in the mirror for her answer.
I think the marketplace will do Lexmark in.
The problem of a legal "justice" system whose decisions automatically favor the side with the most political power is one of the answers to the question "What the hell happened to America?" as US technological dominance and political power disappear over the next decade.
Getting the infrastructure required to make space industrialization possible requires much cheaper ways to get freight into orbit than rockets make possible.
Space industry, employee and tourist housing, etc. requires what will ultimately be shipping goods into orbit by the megaton. This means the cheapest possible shipping method. The possibilities are the Space Elevator and very, very large rail guns. The rail gun is probably possible, the Elevator maybe possible depending on developments in carbon nanotube technology. The Elevator is so much cheaper that it must be tried first if possible.
With respect to safety, any method for getting megatons of freight into orbit means that if the payload goes down instead of up, anyone with the misfortune to be on the downside is in a world of hurt. Making the elevator safer is probably easier than making either rail guns or rocket or scramjet vehicles safer.
Finally, I guess you just don't get how the dynamics of space flight change once one gets 22K miles away from Earth's gravity well.
Given space-based facilities, building space vehicles which will not require the penalty weight required to deal with getting into and out of Earth's atmosphere. Space tugs and other kinds of vehicles intended to get from LEO to lunar orbit get real easy. Lunar facilities capable of launching raw material payloads to LEO, perhaps via a Lunar Space Elevator and space tugs become practical.
The bottom line is that planetary exploration vehicles which would take hundreds of billions of dollars built here and launched into orbit might take a few megabucks to build once one has a space infrastructure built via Space Elevator.
IMHO, the best economic justification for a Space Elevator and shipping up infrastructure is a permanent solution to Earth's current and future energy needs via power satellites. The numbers get a lot more interesting if one can mine silica and turn it into zone-refined silicon on the Lunar surface and turn it into crystalline silicon in orbit. Once such an infrastructure to support this project is built, space industrial parks to take advantage of cheap energy and cheap raw materials can piggyback on it and academic and industrial research can be done cheaply as well. An astrophysicist or astronomer might be able to get to an orbital research facility for a year for a cost to her academic institution no worse than a trip to Antarctica today.
So don't look at a Space Elevator as the end of exploration and exploitation of the Solar System. Look at it as the beginning.
Slashdot Mirror
A user who permits his computer to be used as a tool for attacking another computer /web site / network should be held responsible for maintaining an "attractive nuisance". Users aren't going to be motivated to do even the simple things with respect to security unless they are held responsible. If he's liable for $100 in damages due to the party he let his computer attack for each malware file sent, he's got an incentive to find out what "best practices" are, especially if that's an explicit defense against that kind of lawsuit.
A warning is adequate for a first offense. If somebody has to haul their ass into court to answer for the 50,000 copies of the latest Windows virus they sent me, even if there isn't a cash penalty, they'll take complaints seriously next time before they get into a courtroom, especially when the judge tells him fix your computer or next time,it's $100(USD) per virus or whatever.
And if this persuades people that the Net is too difficult or dangerous to use, that's probably a good thing.
what are ways we can best determine their involvement, or lack of it, in said crimes?
That is what a forensic analysis of a user's computer is supposed to do. Erased files are easy to find. Even overwritten files can be found with the right kind of hard drive recovery tools.
Organized piracy isn't a threat to their monopoly.
The ability to transfer music tracks in a format comparable to FM broadcast quality via Internet makes mass promo theoretically available to "just anybody". That is a threat to their monopoly.
The eventual goal with DRM seems to be to make it impossible to pull multimedia content off the Net that isn't "blessed" by a major content provider.
Locking everybody else out of the mass market.
Wind, duststorms... and lots of connectors. Throw in vandalism. This translates to real high replacement costs.
Finally, since when does inverse square apply to a beam as opposed to radiation from an isotropic source?
Whether it is done in orbit or done on the moon, it scales quite easily. You want more power? Tell the 'bots to fabricate more solar cells. The transmitter automatically joins the rest of the array when placed.
Why not put solar panels on everyones house. Or on the top of building and have them feed battery array.
You want solar on your rooftop? Go buy it. It'll be about $10K including panels, battery banks, and inverter-AC line interface. In a few years, the batteries wear out, in a few more years, the solar cells wear out.
With a space-based service, many of the wear mechanisms terrestrial solar cell power systems simply don't exist, and if cells wear out, the robotic factory can automatically replace them in any case. Perhaps the capital investment is as much as $1K / household and that buys us the start of an industrial scale space infrastructure. Lots of things that can be done with that. Would the price of compute power be impacted if price of the raw material, semiconductor-grade silicon were to drop by 10x or so? What about zero-G crystal fabrication?
Microwaves power is such a cool, but stupid idea. Kind of line nuclear power. Lets create a really expensive solution that leave nuclear waste for our kids to deal with, great....think outside the box people.
Nuclear waste from a solar cell array on the moon or in orbit? You a troll or an idiot?
"manager of technology strategy and outreach" sounds like "promotion" to the point where he can't screw up anything anybody depends on. He doesn't exactly sound like the kind of guy I'd ask "Are we better off converting to VoIP or should we wait for a while longer?" or "should we move our Oracle database onto Linux servers?"
My guess is that he's got an office and a secretary, he reports in when he feels like it and occasionally writes reports that get thrown into the garbage unread. And he wrote the article on "company time" for lack of anything better to do. Judging from what I read in his article, I suspect his secretary even handles his e-mail for him because he's "above" (read can't handle) such mundane tasks.
Can anyone who actually knows what goes on at Princeton tell us if this guy actually responsible for any actual systems or networks?
The company was NOT a USA company
Unless a chunk of burning shuttle or barbecued astronaut hits an important campaign contributor on the head, our Congresscritters simply don't care.
In 2002 Diebold accquired Global Election Systems.
* = CEO is Bob Urosevich, who founded ES&S.
http://www.talion.com/election-machines.html#discl osure
Sequoia uses the same hardware.
Sequoia Voting Systems Inc.
Ownership: Eighty-five percent De La Rue, 15 percent Jefferson Smurfit Group; Smurfs are in the process of selling to Madison Dearborn Partners of Chicago.
* = Sequoia bought Business Records Corporation's optical scan vote tabulation business as part of a 1997 Dept. of Justice anti-trust action with ES&S ? under a licensing agreement, both companies used the same equipment and software.
OK, I goofed with respect to Sequoia. I think my confusion was based on Diebold/Sequoia using the same hardware. My apologies to anybody at either the McCarthy Group companies or Sequoia who find their public association embarrassing.
With respect to the shared hardware, I recommend to Sequoia that they hire some reasonably honest second or third year EE and CS students to design and build some voting machines whose accuracy might be considered believable. Recording and counting votes honestly is NOT rocket science.
They might find it profitable to go Open Source; as they might be able to both differentiate their product and charge premium prices for a product whose honesty and accuracy nobody argues about, assuming that there is a market for honest voting machines and vote tabulation equipment.
This isn't good news for us, Tauzin's political experience is a couple of generations more recent.
This would be a real good time to have a real geek Political Action Committee running on our behalf.
Why do you care? What's your personal interest?
You act like somebody had taken a dump in the middle of your church.
An explanation of your personal interest would do much to define just why we should listen to you and not Everyman.
Who's next after that? Nazi "information" tables? Al-Queda recruiting?
There are things wrong with Linux, but I doubt that Enderle knows what they are.
I keep wondering if he's on Waggener Edstrom's payroll (MS's PR firm) as well as getting a check from whoever it is that mistakes his pieces for objective journalism. Or perhaps he himself is one of these evil zealots he keeps warning us about. Of the Microsoft variety.
Don't know, but I doubt I'll be reading any of his articles again regardless of whether slashdot links to it or not. If I want to read a MS press release, I can find any number of real press releases on the Microsoft site.
You're saying as a free-enterprise Republican that this is a good thing and shows how the marketplace decides things?
The power to rewrite the decision of the votors at the will or whim of an individual, company, or conspiracy is something that nobody ought to have.
I'm sure you can win because court is about justice, not money
Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, and Global are owned by the McCarthy group... I think they can be safely considered one company.
They demanded authority to control the root servers, they got it, we who own domains are paying directly. What the hell are we getting for our money?
To get dates of insider stock sales, go to the SEC site and go to the EDGAR links.
Then, just pop over to the SCO company site for their press releases announcing various and sundry things that can be expected to increase stock prices.
Draw your own conclusions. You should find some. . . interesting coincidences.
Don't know if anyone else has noticed, but these announcements usually come by odd coincidence whenever some SCO insider wants to unload.
I am indeed expecting a shakeout. However, I don't expect the jobs to return to America as a result, I'm expecting most companies either to go terminal or go completely overseas.
The bitter end of outsourcing
9/25/2003 5:00:00 PM - There comes a limit to what you can farm out
by Shane Schick
Cost savings? What cost savings?
At every Conference Board of Canada event, it is customary that the chair offers a recap of each day's presentations the following morning. On Day 2 of this week's Business Process Outsourcing event those responsibilities fell to Blake Hanna, a partner with Accenture in Toronto, who tried to whittle down a series of presentations into a few bullet points. When he was finished he asked the audience if any key issues hadn't been addressed so far. A hand went up.
"I didn't get the impression anyone was saving any money," one guy said.
This was a great comment, because it went straight to the heart of why many people had probably registered for this conference. The best response came from one of the previous day's presenters, Scotia Group vice-president of strategic sourcing Linda Tuck Chapman, who said many enterprises say they expect cost savings of 30 per cent or more from outsourcing. "I don't know where these comments come from," she said. "Sometimes we've managed to see savings of 10 per cent or a little bit more, but it's usually been much more about the value (outsourcing) brings to the company."
------------ end quote
If you aren't a PHM, you should know that hourly rate isn't the only cost involved in outsourcing. It may not even be the most important. Infrastructure costs. Remember, part of why it's cheaper is that the infrastructure isn't all there. Third World phone lines. Electricity that works sometimes. How big are your outsourcer's generators? Oversight costs. Costs of analyzing your processes well enough to allow exporting them.
Plus, if you didn't adequately spec what you're paying for, for any reason, you're hosed when you get the products back, there may not have been money to do it right but there will be money to do it over. Or the company dies right there.
So why do this? Part of it is... PHMs look at labor costs and don't look any further. Part is... if one is planning to cook the books to reflect a profit that really isn't there, if you can talk about savings from outsourcing, people won't look too hard for further explanations.
Probably the Monkeyboy rock video made by a friendly, helpful Mac user. Sorry, don't have the URL offhand... but if MS wants to see just how far they can possibly go to make MS "cool" and how little it will get them, THEY need to find a copy.
If they're visibly obvious, any decent graphics app can be used to zap them out, and several people here have pointed out automated methods to get rid of them. If they actually want to catch pirates, lots of ways to digitally watermark an image.
Or just stego the name/address of the intended recipient into the digital track.
If during a court hearing, the stego decrypt app is run, having a nice image with the name and address of the person being tried show up in what all parties agree is the content whose misuse is the subject of the dispute will be. . . very convincing.
But few consumers now are going to buy the horseshit that we should actually pay for broadcast-quality content without some sort of value-add to the material.
Their options are to come up with something better or fail miserably.
If they think a failure and using the law amd the courts and attacking their best customers to protect their content and distribution monopoly will help them, their dropping profits and declining stock prices are telling quite another story.
Amazingly enough, bar associations have actually paid money to pollsters to answer questions like that.
However, there is one lawyer who need never do this again. Saundra Brown Armstrong can just look in the mirror for her answer.
I think the marketplace will do Lexmark in.
The problem of a legal "justice" system whose decisions automatically favor the side with the most political power is one of the answers to the question "What the hell happened to America?" as US technological dominance and political power disappear over the next decade.
Space industry, employee and tourist housing, etc. requires what will ultimately be shipping goods into orbit by the megaton. This means the cheapest possible shipping method. The possibilities are the Space Elevator and very, very large rail guns. The rail gun is probably possible, the Elevator maybe possible depending on developments in carbon nanotube technology. The Elevator is so much cheaper that it must be tried first if possible.
With respect to safety, any method for getting megatons of freight into orbit means that if the payload goes down instead of up, anyone with the misfortune to be on the downside is in a world of hurt. Making the elevator safer is probably easier than making either rail guns or rocket or scramjet vehicles safer.
Finally, I guess you just don't get how the dynamics of space flight change once one gets 22K miles away from Earth's gravity well.
Given space-based facilities, building space vehicles which will not require the penalty weight required to deal with getting into and out of Earth's atmosphere. Space tugs and other kinds of vehicles intended to get from LEO to lunar orbit get real easy. Lunar facilities capable of launching raw material payloads to LEO, perhaps via a Lunar Space Elevator and space tugs become practical.
The bottom line is that planetary exploration vehicles which would take hundreds of billions of dollars built here and launched into orbit might take a few megabucks to build once one has a space infrastructure built via Space Elevator.
IMHO, the best economic justification for a Space Elevator and shipping up infrastructure is a permanent solution to Earth's current and future energy needs via power satellites. The numbers get a lot more interesting if one can mine silica and turn it into zone-refined silicon on the Lunar surface and turn it into crystalline silicon in orbit. Once such an infrastructure to support this project is built, space industrial parks to take advantage of cheap energy and cheap raw materials can piggyback on it and academic and industrial research can be done cheaply as well. An astrophysicist or astronomer might be able to get to an orbital research facility for a year for a cost to her academic institution no worse than a trip to Antarctica today.
So don't look at a Space Elevator as the end of exploration and exploitation of the Solar System. Look at it as the beginning.