Ok I don't know how many people will read this but...
If it is decided that DECSS is illegal due to being illegally reversed engineered, well will it not effect the whole of the shrink wrap software industry.
How does company A get there software to write the file format of company B. Well by reverse engineering it of course. This is one example, but there must be hundreds of precidents of reverse engineering of software and hardware with the standard shrink wrap licence.
So does this mean for example Microsoft can be sued by the makers of Word Perfect as to use the software they must have clicked on the licence agreement first.
It makes you wonder, doesn't it, replce the words DECSS and the two parties names by any large company and any peice of software and you can see the simularity.
Maybe the software industry will realise this and rally behind us.
It is a little off topic but maybe this is an idea about how to distribute the source for decss legally.
Take one ascii file, say the declaration of indipendance.
Take another file that is the ascii representation of a really long number.
The source of one program that breaks the second file into chucks of 3 digits, this 3 digit number references a character in the first file and writes it out. By the time you work through the second file you have written out the source to decss.
Now what can be banned.
1) The distribution of the declaration of independance?
2) The ascii representation of a number? I don't think so.
3) A program that does not break any copyright protection at all?
In fact you could mirror any 2 of the above and what can be proven?
If anyone feels strongly about this then join up, put your money where your mouth is. This case will set the in stone the future of eectronic freedom of speech.
I would suggest not buying any DVD's in the meantime as well.
The whole point is that you do not need to decrypt DVD's to copy them. I really doubt that the duplication plants do this to copy the things.
DECSS will only give you the movie and not the whole contents of the DVD on your hard drive so it is in fact not a copy of the DVD. It allows a consumer to play the contents of the DVD nothing more.
I detest the control element built into the DVD player technology and refuse to adopt the technology until I can buy a player which legally does not encorporate this "feature". In fact this sticks so much of a monopoly so much more than the microsoft case that I think the DVD industry should be investigated. Current DVD technology is not for the consumer but for the producer to make as much money as they possibly can.
Just one thing as I understand it DVD's conatin about 400 keys, so what happens when the 401st player comes on the market?
The Amiga was a freat home system, not perfect but very good.
You had autoconfig on hardware boards, just plug in hardware, copy a driver into a directory and that was it!!!
It had pre emptive 32bit multi tasking in 1985, and had a consistant user interface, drag and drop, AREXX, inter process communication, used lists for system resources, and best of all was light on the resources. Like you would be amazed by what would run in 16Mb RAM.
Today you have consoles and then you have the PC/MAC with a big of a gap in between.
The console can't be hacked by the end user, and you need plenty of money to hack windows and a MAC. *nix would probably blow away someone trying to learn from scratch how computers work, so there is a gap.
Take the Amiga OS, protect the memory, make the stack dynamic, abstract the hardware more, generally update it a bit to enable growth in the future and couple this with an updated autoconfig bus, have on board CPU, graphics and sound hardware, but allow CPU cards, graphics cards and sound cards to overide the default hardware.
What do you have, a small, effecient, powerful easy to use upgradeable system that is affordable to everyone and is easy for the youth to hack and learn about computers.
I have still and old B2000 that had been upgraded to a 68040 with 16Mb 32bit RAM, 2Mb 16bit RAM and 1Mb chip. It had a CDROM and 2Gb of hard disk as well as an ethernet card. I also have an A4000 that I was given for nothing from my old company that was slinging them out. For the record I have a dual boot 98 / NT box and a dual boot 98 / Linux (redhat 6.1) box (lives mainly as linux).
It was a good system and could still be a good system if someone has the guts to move away from a x86 view of the world, remember with no legacy hacks to contend with the price comes down too.
Well the system uses GPS which is not exactly that accurate, more accurate than stars etc to find you position but not accurate as in you can black out your windows of your car and navigate using GPS alone.
So what happens when you drive near a motorway, hmm seems to think I can go very fast here, or even better the motorway goes over or under or near a 30 zone and suddenly the guy behind you is rapidly filling thier pants as your car slows down from 70 - 30, not by using the brakes (which would light up) but by cutting down on the fuel.
Now when I overtake I don't want the fuel to cut off when I am on the wrong side of the road and can see cars comming towards me. Hmmm that might kill a few people, or any situation where flooring it gets you out of trouble.
Speed does not kill, driving stupidly does, there is a difference and they do not equate to each other. Another thing is that in the UK when you get a fine for speeding it goes straight to the treasury and does not get ploughed back into road safety, bit like our road tax as well, which has most of it's money go to the government coffers.
So really this is not going to happen for technical, political and revenue reasons. Anyway I would love to know where the figures come from for saving lives, dream on.
Well looks like I had better hang onto my Lotus a bit longer just in case.:)
Because Java is not Open Source you can only run the servlet on whatever platform sun deems you to have. So even if you had a JVM that could with a recompile run on any of the Linux hardware platforms, tough because Sun deem that Linux is x86 and nothing more.
As for those of you that say making Java a GPL product would fork it to death, then why has this not happened for example with the Linux kernel? Think about it. If Java was GPL it might have been using CORBA from the start instead of RMI and it might bind to OpenGL instead of it's own Java3D. In fact you might have Open OS's intigrating Java into themselves in such a way that the VM becomes part of the kernel.
A GPL Java with Sun acting as it's Linus would probably be more in goal with the actual language design criteria than it's closed source form is now. There are many platforms which would be excellent for servlets, which could have become the glue for exchanging data from platform to platform but unfortunatly this is not the case right now as the limited JVM ports impeed this.
Why not have a new section under slashdot for maybe the top ten or top one hundred patent abuses? You could list a patent and then it gets voted upon.
Only by highlighting abuses like this will the USPO maybe change. Once there is a list of abuses then the problem can be highlighted in a stronger manner.
Saying closed source that uses GPL will never get found out is untrue. Basically like any secret the more people that know it the less secure it becomes.
Two such ways the news can possibly leak is: a) A disgruntled employee gets fired or leaves and leaks the news. b) A person is recruited from outside the company and does not agree with this and leaks.
Once the news is leaked will not this source get out and the brown stuff hit the fan.
Here is an interesting scenario, lets say for example that you have a company that has taken some GPL software, made some changes and then sell it as you own closed source product.
Apart from the question is it legal for someone else to then redistribute this for free as it is a derived work of the original source, you also have the fact that the copyright holder might at sometime want to sue for damages later on.
Now lets say the violating product sells really well and the copyright holder notices this, does this not mean that they have a nice target to go for? So does this fact alone make it seem the a company would not want to use GPL code in thier products for fear of later being sued. I think such a company would have less ground to stand on than Kodak did against Polariod. Not to mention of course the company becomes a target of all the powers that have been set up to take down the smaller guys for violations of the big corporates licences.
Now lets say you are a contractor mining GPL code for the clients product, and this is later discovered and later used in such a case, would that company not then sue you for damages? I only put this in because a while a go there was an AC boasting about how he mined GPL code and passed it off as his own to his clients.
For an example of such a product check out this post of an alleged violation. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/12/17/20112 22&cid=84
Good point, so basically does it then make it legal to redistribute via say ftp sites a company's derived work.
Lets say for example Amalgamated Breadheads, take gcc, add a small feature and then sell it as ABCC and make it closed source. If you then take ABCC and distribute it via say an ftp site would they then have a leg to stand on?
I take it you would have to have substantial proof of a GPL violation before you did this, but then I think this would hurt a company more than a threat a GPL action.
Ok so lets say you reverse engineer his product and then put it back under the GPL. Can this person then sue you as basically the original GPL invalidates his licence?
Basically as this person violated the GPL licence would they then have a leg to stand on if you violated his licence ?
Is this a bad thing, I don't really think so. Linux is good, but it is not the perfect solution for an OS. I doubt anything within the next 50 years will be the perfect OS.
It will be good to have many different approaches to computing, it is basically evolution in computers. To have any one OS dominate the desktops of the future would be terrible. To give an example, back in 1985 the Amiga had a preemptive multitasking 32 bit OS, the cards that you plugged in were auto configuring (like PCI). Now compare that to Windows and how long it took to go 32 bit even. If Windows had not dominated the market would it taken sooooo long to evolve?
Having competition is good for OS's as the consumer/user benefits in the long run. Personally I would love to have an open source QNX type OS, running as much as possible in a JVM.
I find if I talk people through and help them learn to get it right it pays off more than shouting at them. They will also be more inclined to help you in the future.
I also beleive in treating your inferiors in how you would like your superiors to treat you.
So why not sub contract the cableing out and then bill whoever authorised the security guys to slice the cables.
Otherwise it looks like the system went down again for no reason and you get the blame. After people have thier budgets burned for messing with your stuff they won't do it again.
Hey become a contractor and charge for your time.
Another Journo gets it right, NOT
on
BO2K cracked
·
· Score: 1
Erm no this is not true, remember what one reads in a paper must be true.:)
BTW I suppose BO2K might be installable via an activex component, another secure microsoft feature. Oh yes before anyone points out about signatures and such, dodgy activex coponents have been used in the past by legitimate developers and then they get signed under that developers id.
Ice Tiger
Remember BO2K does not have to rely on the user
on
BO2K cracked
·
· Score: 1
Ok the easiest way to have it installed is via a user running it from email. Remember that NT has been a victim of the good old buffer overflow exploit of late as well.
I have heard of BO being installed via the outlook exploit under 95. Ok so even if this was done under NT then you still get user rights. However what if I installed it on someones IIS server using the recent buffer overflow exploit, or again using the ftp exploit. These will give me access under the user System.
Again these have been patched, but I would be very suprised indeed if the last buffer overflow for a service runnning under NT had been found.
Open source software has to survive in a market where the selling point as it were is quality. Just because something is free (beer) does not mean that it gets used, the quality becomes the determining factor.
Now lets say a company has as it's product services and support for an open source peice of software. The short term gain would be to just milk this without putting anything back, long term gain means that in order for this software to survive it must compete, and compete well. This entails employing developers to improve the product and ensure that the quality remains high. Otherwise the software fails to compete and brings down the companies "product" with it.
So I feel that in order for any company to do well in the open source environment developers have to be employed, hence the free labour model is not as competetive as "controlling" and "enhancing" and keeping the quality high that employing developers would entail.
For example I could release a distro tomorrow, but would it overtake all the other distro's out there? Probably not, because for example I do not add anything new, and over the long term it would be left behind by the "competition".
Ok, I am a tech and I am 31. I remember first using a computer when I was 13 when my dad got us a Sinclair ZX81 (z80 based machine 4kROM, 1kRAM), so like I have been around for a while.:)
What I have found and the others who are 'old' and still do tech is that, the most important skill to have is the ability to learn. The ability to find out things, to know where to look. That is it.
Another thing is you build experiance in getting into the head of of the programmers. If you are trying to integrate systems and so forth there are certain ways that things get done etc so you can again make good guesses where to look to find solutions.
So I don't spend ages learning the ins and outs of stuff I don't need, I can always look it up. If I need to do something I can find out or sus it out.
Also experience is worth more to me when looking to employ than knowledge in a certain tech, as the latter can generally be learned in short order and a good general tech head is better than a dumb expert.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok I don't know how many people will read this but...
If it is decided that DECSS is illegal due to being illegally reversed engineered, well will it not effect the whole of the shrink wrap software industry.
How does company A get there software to write the file format of company B. Well by reverse engineering it of course. This is one example, but there must be hundreds of precidents of reverse engineering of software and hardware with the standard shrink wrap licence.
So does this mean for example Microsoft can be sued by the makers of Word Perfect as to use the software they must have clicked on the licence agreement first.
It makes you wonder, doesn't it, replce the words DECSS and the two parties names by any large company and any peice of software and you can see the simularity.
Maybe the software industry will realise this and rally behind us.
Ice Tiger
Great think about what you have just said. Now go back in time a few years and think of the IBM PC, specifically it's BIOS.
"it sucks that DVD and CSS are not open standards" replace that with "it sucks that the BIOS is not an open standard".
Hence the BIOS was reversed engineered and clones could be made.
This is the same thing.
It is a little off topic but maybe this is an idea about how to distribute the source for decss legally.
Take one ascii file, say the declaration of indipendance.
Take another file that is the ascii representation of a really long number.
The source of one program that breaks the second file into chucks of 3 digits, this 3 digit number references a character in the first file and writes it out. By the time you work through the second file you have written out the source to decss.
Now what can be banned.
1) The distribution of the declaration of independance?
2) The ascii representation of a number? I don't think so.
3) A program that does not break any copyright protection at all?
In fact you could mirror any 2 of the above and what can be proven?
Just a thought anyway, what do you think?
I joined up too, 100 USD
If anyone feels strongly about this then join up, put your money where your mouth is. This case will set the in stone the future of eectronic freedom of speech.
I would suggest not buying any DVD's in the meantime as well.
The whole point is that you do not need to decrypt DVD's to copy them. I really doubt that the duplication plants do this to copy the things.
DECSS will only give you the movie and not the whole contents of the DVD on your hard drive so it is in fact not a copy of the DVD. It allows a consumer to play the contents of the DVD nothing more.
I detest the control element built into the DVD player technology and refuse to adopt the technology until I can buy a player which legally does not encorporate this "feature". In fact this sticks so much of a monopoly so much more than the microsoft case that I think the DVD industry should be investigated. Current DVD technology is not for the consumer but for the producer to make as much money as they possibly can.
Just one thing as I understand it DVD's conatin about 400 keys, so what happens when the 401st player comes on the market?
Guess that's why I have an ASUS K7M and an Athlon 650 on the way.
The Amiga was a freat home system, not perfect but very good.
You had autoconfig on hardware boards, just plug in hardware, copy a driver into a directory and that was it!!!
It had pre emptive 32bit multi tasking in 1985, and had a consistant user interface, drag and drop, AREXX, inter process communication, used lists for system resources, and best of all was light on the resources. Like you would be amazed by what would run in 16Mb RAM.
Today you have consoles and then you have the PC/MAC with a big of a gap in between.
The console can't be hacked by the end user, and you need plenty of money to hack windows and a MAC. *nix would probably blow away someone trying to learn from scratch how computers work, so there is a gap.
Take the Amiga OS, protect the memory, make the stack dynamic, abstract the hardware more, generally update it a bit to enable growth in the future and couple this with an updated autoconfig bus, have on board CPU, graphics and sound hardware, but allow CPU cards, graphics cards and sound cards to overide the default hardware.
What do you have, a small, effecient, powerful easy to use upgradeable system that is affordable to everyone and is easy for the youth to hack and learn about computers.
I have still and old B2000 that had been upgraded to a 68040 with 16Mb 32bit RAM, 2Mb 16bit RAM and 1Mb chip. It had a CDROM and 2Gb of hard disk as well as an ethernet card. I also have an A4000 that I was given for nothing from my old company that was slinging them out. For the record I have a dual boot 98 / NT box and a dual boot 98 / Linux (redhat 6.1) box (lives mainly as linux).
It was a good system and could still be a good system if someone has the guts to move away from a x86 view of the world, remember with no legacy hacks to contend with the price comes down too.
Well the system uses GPS which is not exactly that accurate, more accurate than stars etc to find you position but not accurate as in you can black out your windows of your car and navigate using GPS alone.
:)
So what happens when you drive near a motorway, hmm seems to think I can go very fast here, or even better the motorway goes over or under or near a 30 zone and suddenly the guy behind you is rapidly filling thier pants as your car slows down from 70 - 30, not by using the brakes (which would light up) but by cutting down on the fuel.
Now when I overtake I don't want the fuel to cut off when I am on the wrong side of the road and can see cars comming towards me. Hmmm that might kill a few people, or any situation where flooring it gets you out of trouble.
Speed does not kill, driving stupidly does, there is a difference and they do not equate to each other. Another thing is that in the UK when you get a fine for speeding it goes straight to the treasury and does not get ploughed back into road safety, bit like our road tax as well, which has most of it's money go to the government coffers.
So really this is not going to happen for technical, political and revenue reasons. Anyway I would love to know where the figures come from for saving lives, dream on.
Well looks like I had better hang onto my Lotus a bit longer just in case.
Because Java is not Open Source you can only run the servlet on whatever platform sun deems you to have. So even if you had a JVM that could with a recompile run on any of the Linux hardware platforms, tough because Sun deem that Linux is x86 and nothing more.
As for those of you that say making Java a GPL product would fork it to death, then why has this not happened for example with the Linux kernel? Think about it. If Java was GPL it might have been using CORBA from the start instead of RMI and it might bind to OpenGL instead of it's own Java3D. In fact you might have Open OS's intigrating Java into themselves in such a way that the VM becomes part of the kernel.
A GPL Java with Sun acting as it's Linus would probably be more in goal with the actual language design criteria than it's closed source form is now. There are many platforms which would be excellent for servlets, which could have become the glue for exchanging data from platform to platform but unfortunatly this is not the case right now as the limited JVM ports impeed this.
Why not have a new section under slashdot for maybe the top ten or top one hundred patent abuses? You could list a patent and then it gets voted upon.
Only by highlighting abuses like this will the USPO maybe change. Once there is a list of abuses then the problem can be highlighted in a stronger manner.
Saying closed source that uses GPL will never get found out is untrue. Basically like any secret the more people that know it the less secure it becomes.
Two such ways the news can possibly leak is: a) A disgruntled employee gets fired or leaves and leaks the news. b) A person is recruited from outside the company and does not agree with this and leaks.
Once the news is leaked will not this source get out and the brown stuff hit the fan.
Here is an interesting scenario, lets say for example that you have a company that has taken some GPL software, made some changes and then sell it as you own closed source product.
2 22&cid=84
Apart from the question is it legal for someone else to then redistribute this for free as it is a derived work of the original source, you also have the fact that the copyright holder might at sometime want to sue for damages later on.
Now lets say the violating product sells really well and the copyright holder notices this, does this not mean that they have a nice target to go for? So does this fact alone make it seem the a company would not want to use GPL code in thier products for fear of later being sued. I think such a company would have less ground to stand on than Kodak did against Polariod. Not to mention of course the company becomes a target of all the powers that have been set up to take down the smaller guys for violations of the big corporates licences.
Now lets say you are a contractor mining GPL code for the clients product, and this is later discovered and later used in such a case, would that company not then sue you for damages? I only put this in because a while a go there was an AC boasting about how he mined GPL code and passed it off as his own to his clients.
For an example of such a product check out this post of an alleged violation. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/12/17/2011
Can anyone add or refute any of the above?
Good point, so basically does it then make it legal to redistribute via say ftp sites a company's derived work.
Lets say for example Amalgamated Breadheads, take gcc, add a small feature and then sell it as ABCC and make it closed source. If you then take ABCC and distribute it via say an ftp site would they then have a leg to stand on?
I take it you would have to have substantial proof of a GPL violation before you did this, but then I think this would hurt a company more than a threat a GPL action.
Ok so lets say you reverse engineer his product and then put it back under the GPL. Can this person then sue you as basically the original GPL invalidates his licence?
Basically as this person violated the GPL licence would they then have a leg to stand on if you violated his licence ?
I think an ISO file is much better as it is one file to DL and you can cut straight to a CD or use loopback.
So what does a game developer want on the Linux platform to make it easier to develop for?
I have looked at QNX and thought it looked very neat. The only major problem is it is not open source. Is there anything Open Source like this?
It does not have to be real time I suppose, but the ability to transparently run stuff across networked machines blows me away.
Imagine a future where you build your system like you build your Hi Fi today.
Is this a bad thing, I don't really think so. Linux is good, but it is not the perfect solution for an OS. I doubt anything within the next 50 years will be the perfect OS.
It will be good to have many different approaches to computing, it is basically evolution in computers. To have any one OS dominate the desktops of the future would be terrible. To give an example, back in 1985 the Amiga had a preemptive multitasking 32 bit OS, the cards that you plugged in were auto configuring (like PCI). Now compare that to Windows and how long it took to go 32 bit even. If Windows had not dominated the market would it taken sooooo long to evolve?
Having competition is good for OS's as the consumer/user benefits in the long run. Personally I would love to have an open source QNX type OS, running as much as possible in a JVM.
Ice
Think about it, a fuel air bomb works by making a mist of fuel in the air and igniting it. They also happen to be better than TNT.
Using a spray gun to make a flame thrower would have the same effect, except you would be in the center of the blast.
Not too cool
I find if I talk people through and help them learn to get it right it pays off more than shouting at them. They will also be more inclined to help you in the future.
I also beleive in treating your inferiors in how you would like your superiors to treat you.
So why not sub contract the cableing out and then bill whoever authorised the security guys to slice the cables.
Otherwise it looks like the system went down again for no reason and you get the blame. After people have thier budgets burned for messing with your stuff they won't do it again.
Hey become a contractor and charge for your time.
Erm no this is not true, remember what one reads in a paper must be true. :)
BTW I suppose BO2K might be installable via an activex component, another secure microsoft feature. Oh yes before anyone points out about signatures and such, dodgy activex coponents have been used in the past by legitimate developers and then they get signed under that developers id.
Ice Tiger
Ok the easiest way to have it installed is via a user running it from email. Remember that NT has been a victim of the good old buffer overflow exploit of late as well.
I have heard of BO being installed via the outlook exploit under 95. Ok so even if this was done under NT then you still get user rights. However what if I installed it on someones IIS server using the recent buffer overflow exploit, or again using the ftp exploit. These will give me access under the user System.
Again these have been patched, but I would be very suprised indeed if the last buffer overflow for a service runnning under NT had been found.
Ice Tiger
Open source software has to survive in a market where the selling point as it were is quality. Just because something is free (beer) does not mean that it gets used, the quality becomes the determining factor.
Now lets say a company has as it's product services and support for an open source peice of software. The short term gain would be to just milk this without putting anything back, long term gain means that in order for this software to survive it must compete, and compete well. This entails employing developers to improve the product and ensure that the quality remains high. Otherwise the software fails to compete and brings down the companies "product" with it.
So I feel that in order for any company to do well in the open source environment developers have to be employed, hence the free labour model is not as competetive as "controlling" and "enhancing" and keeping the quality high that employing developers would entail.
For example I could release a distro tomorrow, but would it overtake all the other distro's out there? Probably not, because for example I do not add anything new, and over the long term it would be left behind by the "competition".
Well thats my take anyway.
Ice Tiger
Ok, I am a tech and I am 31. I remember first using a computer when I was 13 when my dad got us a Sinclair ZX81 (z80 based machine 4kROM, 1kRAM), so like I have been around for a while. :)
What I have found and the others who are 'old' and still do tech is that, the most important skill to have is the ability to learn. The ability to find out things, to know where to look. That is it.
Another thing is you build experiance in getting into the head of of the programmers. If you are trying to integrate systems and so forth there are certain ways that things get done etc so you can again make good guesses where to look to find solutions.
So I don't spend ages learning the ins and outs of stuff I don't need, I can always look it up. If I need to do something I can find out or sus it out.
Also experience is worth more to me when looking to employ than knowledge in a certain tech, as the latter can generally be learned in short order and a good general tech head is better than a dumb expert.
Ok I'll shut up now
IceTiger