It appears that we're in basic agreement, despite my disagreeing with what you originally appear to have said.
I'm merely trying to make the point to the high-level suits who read/. as strongly as possible that the price of staying in business is to spend money on and pay attention to politics.
If they do this, that cooperative relationship is assured.
I agree with most of what you have to say. You might want to consider pitching it to a business magazine as an article entitled "What high tech must do to win the confidence of the public again" or something like that.
It's irrelevant to the subject under discussion.
Where the hell did anyone here get the idea that political decisions in DC have any discernable relationship to the public interest?
High tech industries would be hugely influential anyway in DC if they paid the same microscopic fraction of their profits as campaign contributions as Hollywood does. Or the telcos do. Or for that matter, dog food manufacturers do.
Any major corporate CEO is supposed to know that paying off politicians is just another cost of doing business.
It is extremely unlikely that even DC politicians think the telcos invented investment fraud.Enron is NOT a high-tech company. It used high-tech in its operations, just like Texaco or Shell. So much for your poster child. Also note that there are still voices of opposition in Congress to improved securities regulation.
Securities fraud, pump and dump, etc. are not news even to the old-timers on Capitol Hill. Securities fraud has existed as long as there have been securities to sell. It's just another kind of ripoff.
Stock bubbles are not news to anyone who's studied enough history to know what the "Dutch tulip bubble" was, i.e. enough history to get a 4 year degree back when most of the old-timers were in school. It crashed in 1636.
The SEC has been around since 1934. Why was it created? Because investors were ripped off, often in fraud pyramids just as intricate as anything that Enron created or that Andresen signed off on.
The reason for the high-tech companies losing political influence on the Hill has nothing to do with public reaction to the dot.bomb any more than corporations lose influence on The Hill just because their products killed a few people.
Any industry that wants influence on the hill has to buy and pay for it. High tech hasn't done this.
If high-tech companies paid the same miniscule proportion of their profits to DC politicians as the content providers do, we wouldn't have CBDTPA to worry about and the Broadcast Working Group probably wouldn't even exist.
Not likely, because the idea of DVDs that expire a few days after purchase was so bad that even Joe Sixpack wouldn't buy into it.
If you want to give the keys to your computer to anybody but yourself, fine. Publish your static IP address, turn off your firewalls, deinstall your anti-virals, and announce here that you've done this and I'm sure your box will be 0wn3d in a few minutes. Maybe you'll even still get to use it afterwards.
The rest of us obviously have a lot more sense and a lot less trust than you do. Are you new to the Internet? Do you actually buy products that spammers sell? Is your "herbal Viagra" working?
"Trusted Computing" is intended to protect the vendors, not the users. We are the ones that are expected to pay for these boxes. I can't think of any actual benefits which DRM-enabling will give me in actual practice.
If you want to buy it because it's k3wl n3w t3cHn0l0gy, go for it. And post about your experiences, in the post DRM climate, those of us still in the USA will need all the laughs we can get, and those of us who aren't probably deserve some chuckles at US expense as well.
If high-tech industry wants influence on the Hill to prevent laws which are as bad for them as they are for us, they're going to have to buy it just like Hollywood does or the telcos do.
Personally, I think that it would be cheaper for them to buy a few hundred politicians than to move R&D and production operations outside the USA and to develop separate dumbed down models of both consumer hardware and software for the US market. Doing this would require a far smaller percentage of profits than Hollywood is currently paying.
Apparently, the delusion that they can do business with the content industry and even profit by doing so is still prevalent within the industry, with the sellout led by Intel and AMD.
As someone pointed out on the "La Grande, TCPA, and Palladium" thread, what the public will get out of this will be slower, buggier computers and software that won't allow third-party vendor fixes. I'm sure the public will buy the first few thousand... and the word will get out about them within a few hours.
Hopefully, Via and the new microprocessor company in China will have sense enough to realize that a US "Big Brother Inside" in their chips is a BAD IDEA. Or Phillips or one of the other EU electronics hardware companies will start making DRM-free chips and HDs that happily accept open source software. They'll have to, they won't be able to depend on supply from Intel or AMD anymore. Of course, it won't be legal for US users to import these chips, but they might be available on the black market.
For those of you who haven't gotten this yet, AMD SUPPORTS TCPA JUST LIKE INTEL DOES.
When CEOs suddenly realize that they are personally going to have to move to England or Ireland or Canada or Holland or Beijing to keep their jobs, it's going to be a bit too late for them and for the USA. I mean those who are allowed to keep their jobs.
I don't think the investor community is going to forgive CEOs who don't realize a favorable political climate is just as important to high-tech companies as it is to a telco or a manufacturer of dog chow.
" I'm sure that some little hole in the wall business that can't afford MS licenses will pay you reeeal well. Hehe"
I see you drank the Kool-Aid. I've never seen the governments of the European Union or Home Depot described as "hole in the wall" businesses before.
I have seen major enterprises like Ford Aerospace publically telling MS that they're considering Linux... and using this to extort far better licensing terms from MS than they could have gotten otherwise. Perhaps at the next round of licensing, they simply won't bother to extend their Windows tenure at any price.
Well, you obviously have a strong will to believe that you can continue to make a living indefinitely doing what you have been doing. Just as your masters do. People once believed in a Thousand Year Reich. People once believed that slavery was forever. People have believed many things which we now believe to be absurd. You are obviously one of these people.
But, if you really want to compare... in the past 5 years, MSFT's high has been around 120. They're down to 53. LNUX's high has been around 250. They're down to 1. If I were still in tech, and we still investing, yeah, MSFT would definately be the way to go.
The news about the antitrust victory will push MSFT up substantially Monday... very possibly to the highest post-dot.bomb level that will ever be seen. I hope you don't give investment advice for a living, buy high and sell low doesn't work. The market for Linux is growing. The market for MS is as large as it will ever be. Its success in embedded is... less than compelling. Do you really believe that governments and major corporations switching to Linux are evidence of a growing market for MS products?
I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I just want to build a meme in what passes for your mind that'll pop out and say "I told you so" in a few years, and what I'm saying now is adequate for this purpose. I won't be returning to this subthread.
Perhaps you don't know that your masters have already described Linux as a major threat to their future within in-house documents leaked to the press. Perhaps you do know but you have a mystical faith that MS will prevail despite the odds.
Anyway, I'm watching major companies and governments heading for the exits, and infer based on that SMEs heading for the exits as well that are NOT showing up at ZDnet or techweb or CNN... those governments, major companies, and SMEs are my potential employers. And seeing bad news about new W-XP/IIS/IE critical (as described by MS) security problems every day.
Put your own money where your mouth is. Buy lots of Microsoft stock Monday when the markets open, since you have so much faith in its future and obviously believe it can go nowhere but up.
For MS, I think. They've just been reinforced in an in-house perception that they're more important than the Federal Government... and incidentally, than any of their customers.
If they'd gotten their asses handed to them, their new perceptions might have given MS a chance for long-term survival based on listening to their customers and trying to build better products than anybody else. By and large, they now can legally conduct business as usual.
The judge isn't wholly at fault here, DOJ (would large MS campaign contributions to Bush have had anything to do with it) wasn't fighting to win anymore. That's clear even from the public summary. She can only rule on what the opposing sides use for arguments, objective reality has nothing much to do with court decisions.
More governments and businesses refusing to put up with MS licensing terms, bad security, or the constant hardware/software upgrade cycle, and quietly converting to Open Source. They are investigating desktop as well as server, and the consultancy doing this is already rolling out "secure" Linux desktops and server systems in police stations in part of the UK.
I've been working in high-tech journalism for the last few years. Well, the bottom has fallen out of the market and won't be coming back anytime soon, so I'm changing tracks to system administration. I'm convinced enough that MS is part of the past that I won't be bothering with learning W2000/XP or IIS.
Find out who bought the iSmell technology. They had an interesting idea based on microvials on a chip controlled by standard digital inputs, they had in mind smell-enabling Websites. If nobody bought it, you might be able to buy it at fire-sale prices.
They were hoping that they could get this put onto PC packages as standard equipment.
Unfortunately, they had the usual kind of VCs... who pulled the plug as soon as the dot.com turned into the dot.bomb .
I'd already downloaded a development kit. The possibilities for someone with an... unusual sense of humor were compelling. They had a set of instructions... basically Javascript sorts of things, IIRC... as I said, this was supposed to work with code embedded in Web pages.
Innovation will take place where the people who are NOT providing you with the propaganda you spout are in control. Though innovation is obviously something you neither value nor understand, being incapable of it yourself.
It appears that the people running the citiLECs in South Korea and the handful of places in the USA where they exist have found cheaper ways to push bandwidth to end users than your bosses have. Too bad your leaders have managed to suppress free marketplace competition... perhaps the USA will find a workaround.
EU has libertarian philosophies embodied in its government? What are you smoking?
They are usually cited as examples of the "nanny state" and in general, their national and EU government intervenes and interferes in the marketplace at a level that would make the average Democrat rise up in arms. Oh, and except for Switzerland, they all have effective gun control.
As for "if we're behind in IT, so what"... if America becomes a net consumer of technology instead of a producer, it will matter... permanent economic recessions are very nasty things to live through, even if it was the freedom of choice of the cable companies and telcos to contribute money to politicians whose decisions threaten the US economy.
What do you think the US sells to the rest of the world? Books on Libertarian political theory?
Technological progress on the Internet will be made in places where the broadband providers and the government don't buy your regurgitation of cable provider propaganda. Bandwidth costs money, but nothing like the markups the cable providers want to put up... and having to do ONLY what they allow means that new things not specifically allowed are forbidden. If someone wants to do something neat and new, he'll have to buy his own T-1 to do it. A bit difficult for the average CS student, but that's the price of protecting monopoly and duopoly, and it seems you're happy to pay it.
And you'll be buying new tech from the companies in those places and wondering when everything changed and why and why the IT job market never came back in the US. You're one of the reasons I'm learning a foriegn language right now.
The Net isn't just about enabling your social life, and substituting for newspapers, it's a place to develop new technology where the cost of entry is so low that anybody who's semi-serious can play. A place where a college CS student can sit down and write a new application that starts a new industry.
A place where a researcher can write a piece of software... and change the world. Ever heard of Tim Berners-Lee?
The major cable providers and telco are trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle, to turn the Net into a place like broadcasting, where the only technologies that gets deployed are ones they can put toll meters on.
But the US isn't the only country on the Net, and the places where people can work on stuff without worrying about bandwidth caps and which ports are blocked upstream are the ones the US will be buying that new technology from.
The politicians and the FCC think they've made this choice for us. Will we let it stick?
South Korea used a variant on this to wire itself as a nation for broadband. They seem to have no trouble offering 1-10mbps for rates comparable to dialup. Perhaps you should try explaining either to the US citiLECs or South Korea why this can't work. Or the horrors of your bandwidth hogs.
Personally, I'd rather think of interesting consumer and business services that depend on uncapped broadband. Too bad I can't do this for the US market. However, there are other national markets, I don't think South Korea is going to be unique in this for very long. The real danger is that your kind of thinking is likely to make the US unique in another way. Sliding towards Third World status as the only industrialized country that hasn't gotten more or less universal broadband to its citizens as the future rolls out everywhere else.
Why isn't this happening everywhere in the US? There aren't that many government owned public utilities and making their fiber optic networks available to the general public has been made illegal in a number of states due to heavy lobbying by cable and telecoms.
Try googling on citiLECs. This is where municipally owned public utility companies have been taking their internal fiber optic networks and making them available to the general public. This is how South Korea wired its nation for broadband. As a result, IT now plays a larger part in their economy than it does in the USA.
In the USA, citiLECs been selling 1-10 mbps via fiber optic to the curb for rates comparable with dialup ISPs. Unfair competition? Your friends at the cable companies and telcos seem to think so, they've lobbyied legislatures into making future systems illegal in more than one state. California, for instance. Los Angeles and the City of Alameda just got in under the wire. Cable companies think regulation is wonderful, as long as its used to shut out potential competition.
So you think it's OK for cable companies to buy laws designed to interfere in the marketplace but not for laws in the public interest to interfere with their activities. Well, the politicians agree with you.
When you find yourself asking "Do you want fries with that?" and wondering if you'll get to keep that job because nobody can afford the "Happy Meals" your employer is selling and hearing from your friends who emigrated how great things are in IT anywhere but here... just remember your devotion to Libertarian theology... and what it's done for you and your nation.
One where the new Internet technology and maybe even the content comes from places where cable companies / Hollywood content providers don't try to control the technology control the pipes.
South Korea comes immediately to mind. Could things get to the point where we're buying the next generation of high tech from them or from other nations that go the "turn our nation into a set of interconnected CitiLECs" route instead of selling new technology to them?
Is US political leadership planning on ceding control over all technology but the obviously military to... everybody else who can get it together to wire their nations for broadband in exchange for a few million dollars in campaign contributions?
Note: this is a self-defeating strategy because if the US falls behind in commercial technologies... most military technology derives from COTS, not the other way around if it used to be.
The only time I saw security mentioned in the article was in the context of security cams.
What's wrong with this picture?
Does anybody here think that a static IP owned by Catherine Bell or Tony Hawk is any less likely to wind up designating a network 0wn3d by any number of people than one connected to an AOL broadband user with the usual level of home security?
While I'd be very surprised to find that Larry Ellison's home network wasn't designed for security first by the smartest bunch of paranoids he can hire, from what I saw in the article, I'd be equally surprised to find that the opposite isn't true for most of these systems.
The results of this article's posting to/. should be very, very interesting. I wonder how many of these networks have already been r00ted and how many people are heading for Beverly Hills with wireless laptops checking things out since the article was posted?
Any hardcore security types who know the high-end installers in this business probably should give them an e-mail very, very soon... there's some serious money to be made here.
And anyone who's got the kind of money who's reading this should think of how to secure their networks before ordering their home T-3.
Now you know why I've said elsewhere on the thread that while I would like to see this experiment take place, I don't even want to be in a neighboring state if it happens.
You might enjoy what I have to say about the entertainment potential inherent in Libertarian-style deregulation of food at http://www.ecis.com/~alizard/index1.html#cooking , use Libertarian as a search term within your browser from there. Or just read down until you find it, depending on your sense of humor.
While I support the portion of the Libertarian agenda demanding elimination of "victimless crimes" from law like prostitution, drug laws, etc., I support Libertarian beliefs with respect to freedom of speech, and I even agree with the formulation that taxes are essentially a taking of money from citizens at gunpoint in exchange for certain services, I regard many but not all of these services as necessary for the maintenance of a community one can either live in or do business in, and I don't think purist Libertarian have a clue as to what 'necessary' services are, or that their faith that citizens will fund these services of their own free well is justifiable.
But I fully support the right of these people to try this experiment. At a safe distance.
DISCLAIMER: IANAL... and I think you need your own legal counsel RIGHT NOW!
You're a Oxygen Transfill Technician and you're ALSO the HIPAA Compliance Officer?
Are you being given authority (as the guy said, "FOLLOW THESE RULES OR FIND ANOTHER INDUSTRY TO WORK IN!) and budget for consultants, including legal and software and clerical assistance to help you get your company up to speed on this? Have you gotten a pay raise? Are you now at VP level at your company?
If not, you might as well get used to an unofficial job title of "Company Fall Guy"... they have no intention of getting into compliance until they are forced to. I suggest you document your activities CAREFULLY (start with your initial assignment... names, dates, places) in the likely event that you're going to wind up in court... with the company blaming YOU for incompetence.
And start putting out resumes NOW for another gig in the field of Oxygen Transfill Technician, you need another job a lot closer to your training and experience. The real skill set that fit your assignment are a combination of law and system administration... the minimum set would be a telecommunications lawyer who understands the underlying technology or at least enough of it to work with an IT pro to figure out what this really means to your organization... or IT pro with IMMEDIATE access to HIPAA-qualified legal counsel.
Your immediate responsibility to yourself is to get some legal advice... which I suspect strongly will be along the lines I suggested.
There is some very good advice on compliance and technology here, but if you don't have authority and budget, get your ass out of there... you probably ought to get out of there even if you do, because if anything goes wrong, you will be blamed.
What you say is what the Libertarians claim and the underlying assertion is that they have solved the essential problems with government that comprise half of human history (the other half is technological invention).
What I want to know is what happens when the rubber meets the road. Entertainment potential aside, that's why I'm hoping the experiment is actually done. Will people behave responsibly if they are not compelled to? Can this work even in a population of like-minded people committed to the Libertarian ideology/secular religion?
While my opinion is that the results will be disastrous enough that I don't even want to be in a neighboring state to it, experiment is far more credible than opinion. Perhaps you guys can build a Utopia and a new model for workable government.
Do you personally intend to be part of this experiment?
You're probably right... and buying majorities of politicians in the right Latin American country might be within the reach of 20,000 American geeks. Frankly, I'm surprised major American corporations who would like out from restrictions like monopoly, anti-securities fraud, and anti-pollution laws haven't already done this. Of course, it may be that the level of pressure to make this cost-effective hasn't happened yet. CBDTPA hasn't passed yet.
My guess is that the Feds will find something unpleasant to do about this if they succeed, ranging from cutting off subsidy programs required to keep local infrastructures going to sending in tanks.
If they succeed, what I expect people to do to each other will be even more interesting. Someone said "where we can paint our house whatever color we please". Seems to be that the Libertarian philosophy that allows everything to be subject to contract would allow housing associations to pass restrictive covenants that make current city ordinances of the idiotic variety look benign.
What happens in an economic downturn with no safety net? 20K geeks with no local employment and no welfare make an interesting combination. The pure pursuit of any ideology doesn't guarantee economic prosperity.
What happens when local infrastructure becomes part of an unprotected commons where the only contributions to keep the streets paved are voluntary? What happens to schools when most people don't have kids? What happens to libraries when the people who dominate local politics are content with their own personal book collections? What happens when a major corporation decides to take advantage of no local anti-pollution laws, and hires a mercenary force to protect its facilities from shutdown when the locals make some?
What happens when every local service only exists as long as there are people who directly and immediately benefit from it?
I'm not arguing that the people working with this project shouldn't do it, I'd like to see it happen. And I hope that whatever else goes down in Montana, the Net stays up, because I want to see lots of reporting on the results. I could be wrong about this, perhaps people really are responsible enough to make it work.
When Clinton fired cruise missiles at Bin Laden, it was the first time that the US had shot missiles and bombed not a country, but an individual.
The second, I think Saddam Hussein was the first.
The anthrax attacks appear to a another example of the intersection of powerful knowledge and destructive intent creating significant dangers and disruption.
Perhaps true, but you picked another bad example. The evidence revealed so far indicates an individual who had access to US bioweapon stockpiles.
Anybody can be a major threat given access to the resources of a nation-state.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm merely trying to make the point to the high-level suits who read /. as strongly as possible that the price of staying in business is to spend money on and pay attention to politics.
If they do this, that cooperative relationship is assured.
It's irrelevant to the subject under discussion.
Where the hell did anyone here get the idea that political decisions in DC have any discernable relationship to the public interest?
High tech industries would be hugely influential anyway in DC if they paid the same microscopic fraction of their profits as campaign contributions as Hollywood does. Or the telcos do. Or for that matter, dog food manufacturers do.
Any major corporate CEO is supposed to know that paying off politicians is just another cost of doing business.
Securities fraud, pump and dump, etc. are not news even to the old-timers on Capitol Hill. Securities fraud has existed as long as there have been securities to sell. It's just another kind of ripoff.
Stock bubbles are not news to anyone who's studied enough history to know what the "Dutch tulip bubble" was, i.e. enough history to get a 4 year degree back when most of the old-timers were in school. It crashed in 1636.
The SEC has been around since 1934. Why was it created? Because investors were ripped off, often in fraud pyramids just as intricate as anything that Enron created or that Andresen signed off on.
The reason for the high-tech companies losing political influence on the Hill has nothing to do with public reaction to the dot.bomb any more than corporations lose influence on The Hill just because their products killed a few people.
Any industry that wants influence on the hill has to buy and pay for it. High tech hasn't done this.
If high-tech companies paid the same miniscule proportion of their profits to DC politicians as the content providers do, we wouldn't have CBDTPA to worry about and the Broadcast Working Group probably wouldn't even exist.
Not likely, because the idea of DVDs that expire a few days after purchase was so bad that even Joe Sixpack wouldn't buy into it.
If you want to give the keys to your computer to anybody but yourself, fine. Publish your static IP address, turn off your firewalls, deinstall your anti-virals, and announce here that you've done this and I'm sure your box will be 0wn3d in a few minutes. Maybe you'll even still get to use it afterwards.
The rest of us obviously have a lot more sense and a lot less trust than you do. Are you new to the Internet? Do you actually buy products that spammers sell? Is your "herbal Viagra" working?
"Trusted Computing" is intended to protect the vendors, not the users. We are the ones that are expected to pay for these boxes. I can't think of any actual benefits which DRM-enabling will give me in actual practice.
If you want to buy it because it's k3wl n3w t3cHn0l0gy, go for it. And post about your experiences, in the post DRM climate, those of us still in the USA will need all the laughs we can get, and those of us who aren't probably deserve some chuckles at US expense as well.
Personally, I think that it would be cheaper for them to buy a few hundred politicians than to move R&D and production operations outside the USA and to develop separate dumbed down models of both consumer hardware and software for the US market. Doing this would require a far smaller percentage of profits than Hollywood is currently paying.
Apparently, the delusion that they can do business with the content industry and even profit by doing so is still prevalent within the industry, with the sellout led by Intel and AMD.
As someone pointed out on the "La Grande, TCPA, and Palladium" thread, what the public will get out of this will be slower, buggier computers and software that won't allow third-party vendor fixes. I'm sure the public will buy the first few thousand... and the word will get out about them within a few hours.
Hopefully, Via and the new microprocessor company in China will have sense enough to realize that a US "Big Brother Inside" in their chips is a BAD IDEA. Or Phillips or one of the other EU electronics hardware companies will start making DRM-free chips and HDs that happily accept open source software. They'll have to, they won't be able to depend on supply from Intel or AMD anymore. Of course, it won't be legal for US users to import these chips, but they might be available on the black market.
For those of you who haven't gotten this yet, AMD SUPPORTS TCPA JUST LIKE INTEL DOES.
When CEOs suddenly realize that they are personally going to have to move to England or Ireland or Canada or Holland or Beijing to keep their jobs, it's going to be a bit too late for them and for the USA. I mean those who are allowed to keep their jobs.
I don't think the investor community is going to forgive CEOs who don't realize a favorable political climate is just as important to high-tech companies as it is to a telco or a manufacturer of dog chow.
I see you drank the Kool-Aid. I've never seen the governments of the European Union or Home Depot described as "hole in the wall" businesses before.
I have seen major enterprises like Ford Aerospace publically telling MS that they're considering Linux... and using this to extort far better licensing terms from MS than they could have gotten otherwise. Perhaps at the next round of licensing, they simply won't bother to extend their Windows tenure at any price.
Well, you obviously have a strong will to believe that you can continue to make a living indefinitely doing what you have been doing. Just as your masters do. People once believed in a Thousand Year Reich. People once believed that slavery was forever. People have believed many things which we now believe to be absurd. You are obviously one of these people.
But, if you really want to compare... in the past 5 years, MSFT's high has been around 120. They're down to 53. LNUX's high has been around 250. They're down to 1. If I were still in tech, and we still investing, yeah, MSFT would definately be the way to go.
The news about the antitrust victory will push MSFT up substantially Monday... very possibly to the highest post-dot.bomb level that will ever be seen. I hope you don't give investment advice for a living, buy high and sell low doesn't work. The market for Linux is growing. The market for MS is as large as it will ever be. Its success in embedded is ... less than compelling. Do you really believe that governments and major corporations switching to Linux are evidence of a growing market for MS products?
I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I just want to build a meme in what passes for your mind that'll pop out and say "I told you so" in a few years, and what I'm saying now is adequate for this purpose. I won't be returning to this subthread.
Perhaps you don't know that your masters have already described Linux as a major threat to their future within in-house documents leaked to the press. Perhaps you do know but you have a mystical faith that MS will prevail despite the odds.
Anyway, I'm watching major companies and governments heading for the exits, and infer based on that SMEs heading for the exits as well that are NOT showing up at ZDnet or techweb or CNN... those governments, major companies, and SMEs are my potential employers. And seeing bad news about new W-XP/IIS/IE critical (as described by MS) security problems every day.
Enjoy your leaders' court victory.
While you can.
Put your own money where your mouth is. Buy lots of Microsoft stock Monday when the markets open, since you have so much faith in its future and obviously believe it can go nowhere but up.
If they'd gotten their asses handed to them, their new perceptions might have given MS a chance for long-term survival based on listening to their customers and trying to build better products than anybody else. By and large, they now can legally conduct business as usual.
The judge isn't wholly at fault here, DOJ (would large MS campaign contributions to Bush have had anything to do with it) wasn't fighting to win anymore. That's clear even from the public summary. She can only rule on what the opposing sides use for arguments, objective reality has nothing much to do with court decisions.
The future?
Brussels to spend 250k on Linux migration study
More governments and businesses refusing to put up with MS licensing terms, bad security, or the constant hardware/software upgrade cycle, and quietly converting to Open Source. They are investigating desktop as well as server, and the consultancy doing this is already rolling out "secure" Linux desktops and server systems in police stations in part of the UK.
I've been working in high-tech journalism for the last few years. Well, the bottom has fallen out of the market and won't be coming back anytime soon, so I'm changing tracks to system administration. I'm convinced enough that MS is part of the past that I won't be bothering with learning W2000/XP or IIS.
They were hoping that they could get this put onto PC packages as standard equipment.
Unfortunately, they had the usual kind of VCs... who pulled the plug as soon as the dot.com turned into the dot.bomb .
I'd already downloaded a development kit. The possibilities for someone with an... unusual sense of humor were compelling. They had a set of instructions... basically Javascript sorts of things, IIRC... as I said, this was supposed to work with code embedded in Web pages.
It appears that the people running the citiLECs in South Korea and the handful of places in the USA where they exist have found cheaper ways to push bandwidth to end users than your bosses have. Too bad your leaders have managed to suppress free marketplace competition... perhaps the USA will find a workaround.
They are usually cited as examples of the "nanny state" and in general, their national and EU government intervenes and interferes in the marketplace at a level that would make the average Democrat rise up in arms. Oh, and except for Switzerland, they all have effective gun control.
As for "if we're behind in IT, so what"... if America becomes a net consumer of technology instead of a producer, it will matter... permanent economic recessions are very nasty things to live through, even if it was the freedom of choice of the cable companies and telcos to contribute money to politicians whose decisions threaten the US economy.
What do you think the US sells to the rest of the world? Books on Libertarian political theory?
Technological progress on the Internet will be made in places where the broadband providers and the government don't buy your regurgitation of cable provider propaganda. Bandwidth costs money, but nothing like the markups the cable providers want to put up... and having to do ONLY what they allow means that new things not specifically allowed are forbidden. If someone wants to do something neat and new, he'll have to buy his own T-1 to do it. A bit difficult for the average CS student, but that's the price of protecting monopoly and duopoly, and it seems you're happy to pay it.
And you'll be buying new tech from the companies in those places and wondering when everything changed and why and why the IT job market never came back in the US. You're one of the reasons I'm learning a foriegn language right now.
A place where a researcher can write a piece of software... and change the world. Ever heard of Tim Berners-Lee?
The major cable providers and telco are trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle, to turn the Net into a place like broadcasting, where the only technologies that gets deployed are ones they can put toll meters on.
But the US isn't the only country on the Net, and the places where people can work on stuff without worrying about bandwidth caps and which ports are blocked upstream are the ones the US will be buying that new technology from.
The politicians and the FCC think they've made this choice for us. Will we let it stick?
South Korea used a variant on this to wire itself as a nation for broadband. They seem to have no trouble offering 1-10mbps for rates comparable to dialup. Perhaps you should try explaining either to the US citiLECs or South Korea why this can't work. Or the horrors of your bandwidth hogs.
Personally, I'd rather think of interesting consumer and business services that depend on uncapped broadband. Too bad I can't do this for the US market. However, there are other national markets, I don't think South Korea is going to be unique in this for very long. The real danger is that your kind of thinking is likely to make the US unique in another way. Sliding towards Third World status as the only industrialized country that hasn't gotten more or less universal broadband to its citizens as the future rolls out everywhere else.
Why isn't this happening everywhere in the US? There aren't that many government owned public utilities and making their fiber optic networks available to the general public has been made illegal in a number of states due to heavy lobbying by cable and telecoms.
In the USA, citiLECs been selling 1-10 mbps via fiber optic to the curb for rates comparable with dialup ISPs. Unfair competition? Your friends at the cable companies and telcos seem to think so, they've lobbyied legislatures into making future systems illegal in more than one state. California, for instance. Los Angeles and the City of Alameda just got in under the wire. Cable companies think regulation is wonderful, as long as its used to shut out potential competition.
So you think it's OK for cable companies to buy laws designed to interfere in the marketplace but not for laws in the public interest to interfere with their activities. Well, the politicians agree with you.
Your version of fundamental civil liberty as implemented by politicians has put the entire US economy at risk.
When you find yourself asking "Do you want fries with that?" and wondering if you'll get to keep that job because nobody can afford the "Happy Meals" your employer is selling and hearing from your friends who emigrated how great things are in IT anywhere but here... just remember your devotion to Libertarian theology... and what it's done for you and your nation.
South Korea comes immediately to mind. Could things get to the point where we're buying the next generation of high tech from them or from other nations that go the "turn our nation into a set of interconnected CitiLECs" route instead of selling new technology to them?
Is US political leadership planning on ceding control over all technology but the obviously military to ... everybody else who can get it together to wire their nations for broadband in exchange for a few million dollars in campaign contributions?
Note: this is a self-defeating strategy because if the US falls behind in commercial technologies... most military technology derives from COTS, not the other way around if it used to be.
Stay tuned.
Like the people who write spambots.
So if you find some, catch me in e-mail. :-) Of course, my interests are only for legitimate security and research purposes.
What's wrong with this picture?
Does anybody here think that a static IP owned by Catherine Bell or Tony Hawk is any less likely to wind up designating a network 0wn3d by any number of people than one connected to an AOL broadband user with the usual level of home security?
While I'd be very surprised to find that Larry Ellison's home network wasn't designed for security first by the smartest bunch of paranoids he can hire, from what I saw in the article, I'd be equally surprised to find that the opposite isn't true for most of these systems.
The results of this article's posting to /. should be very, very interesting. I wonder how many of these networks have already been r00ted and how many people are heading for Beverly Hills with wireless laptops checking things out since the article was posted?
Any hardcore security types who know the high-end installers in this business probably should give them an e-mail very, very soon... there's some serious money to be made here.
And anyone who's got the kind of money who's reading this should think of how to secure their networks before ordering their home T-3.
You might enjoy what I have to say about the entertainment potential inherent in Libertarian-style deregulation of food at http://www.ecis.com/~alizard/index1.html#cooking , use Libertarian as a search term within your browser from there. Or just read down until you find it, depending on your sense of humor.
While I support the portion of the Libertarian agenda demanding elimination of "victimless crimes" from law like prostitution, drug laws, etc., I support Libertarian beliefs with respect to freedom of speech, and I even agree with the formulation that taxes are essentially a taking of money from citizens at gunpoint in exchange for certain services, I regard many but not all of these services as necessary for the maintenance of a community one can either live in or do business in, and I don't think purist Libertarian have a clue as to what 'necessary' services are, or that their faith that citizens will fund these services of their own free well is justifiable.
But I fully support the right of these people to try this experiment. At a safe distance.
You're a Oxygen Transfill Technician and you're ALSO the HIPAA Compliance Officer?
Are you being given authority (as the guy said, "FOLLOW THESE RULES OR FIND ANOTHER INDUSTRY TO WORK IN!) and budget for consultants, including legal and software and clerical assistance to help you get your company up to speed on this? Have you gotten a pay raise? Are you now at VP level at your company?
If not, you might as well get used to an unofficial job title of "Company Fall Guy"... they have no intention of getting into compliance until they are forced to. I suggest you document your activities CAREFULLY (start with your initial assignment... names, dates, places) in the likely event that you're going to wind up in court... with the company blaming YOU for incompetence.
And start putting out resumes NOW for another gig in the field of Oxygen Transfill Technician, you need another job a lot closer to your training and experience. The real skill set that fit your assignment are a combination of law and system administration... the minimum set would be a telecommunications lawyer who understands the underlying technology or at least enough of it to work with an IT pro to figure out what this really means to your organization... or IT pro with IMMEDIATE access to HIPAA-qualified legal counsel.
Your immediate responsibility to yourself is to get some legal advice... which I suspect strongly will be along the lines I suggested.
There is some very good advice on compliance and technology here, but if you don't have authority and budget, get your ass out of there... you probably ought to get out of there even if you do, because if anything goes wrong, you will be blamed.
What I want to know is what happens when the rubber meets the road. Entertainment potential aside, that's why I'm hoping the experiment is actually done. Will people behave responsibly if they are not compelled to? Can this work even in a population of like-minded people committed to the Libertarian ideology/secular religion?
While my opinion is that the results will be disastrous enough that I don't even want to be in a neighboring state to it, experiment is far more credible than opinion. Perhaps you guys can build a Utopia and a new model for workable government.
Do you personally intend to be part of this experiment?
You're probably right... and buying majorities of politicians in the right Latin American country might be within the reach of 20,000 American geeks. Frankly, I'm surprised major American corporations who would like out from restrictions like monopoly, anti-securities fraud, and anti-pollution laws haven't already done this. Of course, it may be that the level of pressure to make this cost-effective hasn't happened yet. CBDTPA hasn't passed yet.
My guess is that the Feds will find something unpleasant to do about this if they succeed, ranging from cutting off subsidy programs required to keep local infrastructures going to sending in tanks.
If they succeed, what I expect people to do to each other will be even more interesting. Someone said "where we can paint our house whatever color we please". Seems to be that the Libertarian philosophy that allows everything to be subject to contract would allow housing associations to pass restrictive covenants that make current city ordinances of the idiotic variety look benign.
What happens in an economic downturn with no safety net? 20K geeks with no local employment and no welfare make an interesting combination. The pure pursuit of any ideology doesn't guarantee economic prosperity.
What happens when local infrastructure becomes part of an unprotected commons where the only contributions to keep the streets paved are voluntary? What happens to schools when most people don't have kids? What happens to libraries when the people who dominate local politics are content with their own personal book collections? What happens when a major corporation decides to take advantage of no local anti-pollution laws, and hires a mercenary force to protect its facilities from shutdown when the locals make some?
What happens when every local service only exists as long as there are people who directly and immediately benefit from it?
I'm not arguing that the people working with this project shouldn't do it, I'd like to see it happen. And I hope that whatever else goes down in Montana, the Net stays up, because I want to see lots of reporting on the results. I could be wrong about this, perhaps people really are responsible enough to make it work.
The second, I think Saddam Hussein was the first.
The anthrax attacks appear to a another example of the intersection of powerful knowledge and destructive intent creating significant dangers and disruption.
Perhaps true, but you picked another bad example. The evidence revealed so far indicates an individual who had access to US bioweapon stockpiles.
Anybody can be a major threat given access to the resources of a nation-state.