Don't forget offsite storage. A year or so ago I was listening to a piece about the Kennedy family's personal photographer, Jacques Lowe. Besides all of his published photographs that practically single-handedly sold the Camelot image, he had many more unpublished images. To keep all of his important works, he kept them in a safe deposit box at a JP Morgan bank branch, located at 5 World Trade Center. The bank was damaged during the collapse of the Twin Towers and the negatives are believed to have be destroyed.
Re:FOIA does not make it open source
on
Jess in Action
·
· Score: 1
If it was actually made by the US Government, it can't be covered by copyright (see http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html) The reason it is set up that way, even if it isn't nearly as apparent now, is that it is our government. If they are creating works, they are doing so on our behalf, and we should be the recipients. Copyright has the work-for-hire concept, where an employees work is owned by the employer. For government works, we are the employer.
The exception, or perhaps loophole, depending on your point of view, are works created by private corporations under contract to the government. If it was created by people under contract, then the corporations awarded the contract would likely own the copyright.
According to this message that I read on Bugtraq, http://securityfocus.com/archive/1/342825/2003-10- 30/2003-11-05/2, Chris Sysopal from @stake says "When we reported these issues to Apple they told us that they would have them fixed
in the Panther release timeframe. To be honest, I assumed there would also be
a patch for 10.2. We certainly didn't dictate any specific way of releasing the
fixes. "
This is a little bit different than the one than you seem to be thinking of. In 2000, The NY Times obtained classified documents about the 1953 coup that brought the Shah of Iran into power. They incorrectly redacted the document to preserve their sources and protect some government operatives before publishing it. (See Iranian Coup Plotters Exposed By PDF File)
In this case, the government handed over the document with the naughty bits already blocked out, but didn't release that PDF is more like a collage than like graph paper.
Safari uses the standard Cocoa text area control. Because of this it has spell checking, it just has to be enabled. Right-click in a text area, choose Spelling->Check Spelling As You Type from the menu, and the red dotted underline appears under each misspelled word. I know it works, because I've used it to help me catch a couple of spelling errors in this very message.
From what I understand, Panther's text area window gives some improvements to this feature. (allowing F5 to be used in a manner similar to Auto-complete)
Scully is echoing comments from Tim Berners-Lee during the development of the web. The original proposal for the world wide web specifically mentions
Hypercard when describing what the system does.
I'm sorry. I remember too much of the antitrust suit against IBM to fully trust them. I'll thank them for each thing they do to help advance free software, and the computer industry as a whole, but I reserve the right to examine each decision individually.
The ">console" user is convenient for occational text mode access, but if you want it to be the default, you probably want to modify the way loginwindow.app gets run.
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Am I just focused on a particular aspect of the open source landscale? or are there fair number of open source products owned by a corporation with a vested interest in its direction?
The term hacker was both used and misused long before anyone came up with the term cracker to be someone who breaks into computer systems. It was essentially an attempt to deflect the popular press away from the word hacker, and allow it to regain the former meaning of respect.
It didn't work. The popular press hasn't let go of the word hacker to mean computer criminal. They haven't picked up on the term Cracker. Instead of trying to explain what hacker means , we need to what hacker and cracker mean and what differentiates them. Meanwhile, we are also trying to explain that we are speaking the same language, despite having different definitions for just about everything.
I think we should give up on trying to people to use the term cracker to mean computer criminal. It already has an entirely different (although no less positive) meaning. We can't just play you stole our word, so we'll steal one of yours. The term cracker is evidence that jargon can't be forced, it has to spring up naturally.
Now for why someone who reads slashdot submitted an article that uses the word hacker incorrectly. I have no explanation.
What it seems to me that Apple sees some benefits to open source, and some disadvantages. For different products, the pros and cons of each lead to a determination of what sort of license to use.
Using open source packages like Apache, Python, Perl, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, OpenLDAP, KHTML, and FreeBSD's userland tools decreases their development time. Making systems like NetInfo, Rendezvous, Quicktime Streaming Server Open Source adds to potential wider adoption of their technologies. Using Open Source in these is a benefit to them
Keeping large portions of the OS X and OS X Server systems closed source allows them to collect significant financial rewards from their sale.
Apple seems to be viewing the complete financial picture when deciding a license for a product. The sales point of view: How many units can they sell? The engineering point of view: How long will it take to build. The marketing point of view:Are there enough products out there that work with ours that would make someone buy it. These points are weighed and a course of action chosen.
They aren't the only company with a dual closed source/open source strategy. The Zope company comes to mind. They fund Python development with their PythonLabs subsidiary. (That has always sort of reminded me of the way that SGI bought MIPS to ensure that the CPU their products were built on had continued development.) They create open source packages like ZODB, Zope, and CMF. They also sell packages built off these technologies like ZRS (Zope Replication Server, for replicated ZODBs) Zope4Media (A content management a publishing system) Again, Zope seems to carefully weigh the benefits of community development and wider adoption against the benefits of direct financial remuneration.
It wasn't some guy suddenly deciding to patent software. The Supreme Court decided in Diamond v. Diehr that the USPTO's regulations at the time were unconstitutional. In case you don't follow the link, Diamond v. Diehr was about a method for vulcanizing rubber that used software connected to sensors to determine how best to heat the rubber.
So the USPTO (part of the executive branch of government) was prohibited (by the judicial branch) from following their current regulations. They got no help from Congress (the legislative branch) by creating new laws to help them guide new regulations. The USPTO can't unilaterally revert to their previous rules. Either someone needs to bring a new case to the Supreme Court to challenge the current USPTO regulations, or Congress needs to pass laws that will pass a judicial challenge.
You seem to be jumping to conclusions about my personal opinions or preferences about software and business process patents. By picturing an alternate reality in which software is and always has been patentable, it doesn't mean that I wished that I lived in that reality. It doesn't matter anyway, because we can't change the course of past events. We can't truly determine the effects of a world that always had software patents, and even if we could, we couldn't succeed at emulating that course.
That leads back to the problem, though. We can't go back. Neither side can. Some people may wish that Diamond v. Diehr never happened, but it did. The Supreme Court has forced the USPTO to accept patents for software. Some people may wish that the USPTO awarded software patents earlier, but they didn't and the software industry as it exists today is because the USPTO had its hands off approach.
If patents on systems implemented in software were granted from day one, the software industry would be very different than it is today. Other industries, electronics for example, deal with patents and licensing on a day to day basis and the state of the art keeps advancing. One could argue whether it would be better or worse, but at least it would be consistent. What we have today is the worst of both worlds. We have a patent office accepting patents while they have no concept of the state of the art or prior art.
Personally, I feel what the patent office is missing is the idea that computers are designed to be infinitely configurable machines, and that software just sets the machine to a particular configuration. Being able to patent software is like being able to patent a particular Lego layout.
But just to let you know, if it would have been possible to patent Hello World, and if the patent to it had coincided with the publication of the first edition of the book The C Programming Language (long after string output had implemented in software), then the patent would have expired by now.
Patent examimers are supposed to do a check for prior art. Unfortunately, their usual body of work to check from is other patents. From their point of view, useful items are patented, so examining other patent filings is the best place to find already existing inventions.
The problem is, there patent office refused patents on software until forced to by the Supreme Court in the 1981 case Diamond v. Diehr The software industry developed without any consideration to patents, and now the patent office is missing decades of the basic building blocks needed for determing the novel from the mundane.
If you are correct about them planning on reducing their workforce, you could take the announcement this way:
If you think release cycles are long now, wait until we don't have any employees anymore. We're going to try to bring as much of the open source community in to help us on our product, so when we let all of our developers go, it won't affect schedule too much.
I'd say that they're just trying to up the ante, and frankly the digital media creation software industry could really use the higher standards.
The same way the bundling of MacWrite upped the ante for Macintosh Word Processing programs through the '80s?
When Apple bundled MacWrite with each Mac, the only other word processor was Microsoft Word and eventually WriteNow. After they stopped, WordPerfect, FullWrite, and Nisus was released. As well as integrated word processing programs like MS-Works, GreatWorks and ClarisWorks. (yes, Clarisworks was published by Claris, an Apple subsidiary but the software developers created it without knowing who would eventually publish it.)
Apple spun of its application development to Claris and stopped producing application software specifically because they were too strong of a competitor for a software publisher to compete against in the Mac market. I wonder what changed?
The part where the OS gets involved is when it uses the same mechanism to associate documents with their application as they do interpreted code with their interpreter.
The "application" Content-Type is to be used for data which
do not fit in any of the other categories, and particularly
for data to be processed by mail-based uses of application
programs. This is information which must be processed by an
application before it is viewable or usable to a user.
Expected uses for Content-Type application include mail-
based file transfer, spreadsheets, data for mail-based
scheduling systems, and languages for "active"
(computational) email. (The latter, in particular, can pose
security problems which should be understood by
implementors, and are considered in detail in the discussion
of the application/PostScript content-type.)
and
Security considerations: This type is intended for the
transmission of data to be interpreted by locally-installed
programs. If used, for example, to transmit executable
binary programs or programs in general-purpose interpreted
languages, such as LISP programs or shell scripts, severe
security problems could result. In general, authors of
mail-reading agents are cautioned against giving their
systems the power to execute mail-based application data
without carefully considering the security implications.
While it is certainly possible to define safe application
formats and even safe interpreters for unsafe formats, each
interpreter should be evaluated separately for possible
security problems.
Just because the designers of outlook essentially ignored the data description features of MIME didn't mean they had to ignore the warnings of the dangers of executable content. There is no reason why a mail reader should associate a.sh file, or an application/x-shell-script file with a general purpose interpreter, and the people who invented MIME knew this and warned about it.
There is no good reason for a mail program to run hand executable content off to the OS or an interpreter.
What about the case when there are you notice that an exploit is actively being used?
Sure, tell the vendor first so they can start working on a patch; but tell other admins immediately afterwards, so they can start devising their own workarounds.
Even so, they have to time their payola payments to clearchannel, their other promotional efforts (point of purchase displays, magazine advertisement, press journalist junkets, etc.) and the release of the single.
If they gave their entire promotional budget to clearchannel at the beginning, they would probably come back in 3 weeks and say "we can get your single played on x more stations for an extra $y." (for moderate values of x and large values of y) Record companies also wind up with the situation where they can't increase album sales no matter how much they pay clearchannel to promote it.
They know they can get clearchannel to make any song popular for a week. The trick is to use the popularity of the first single as an additional marketing boost for the second single, and then use the long running popularity of the album (based on waves of popularity for each single) to give it legs of its own. (where minimal additional promotion is needed relative to sales.)
Buying the album from iTunes gives you the ability to listen t the product immediately. Buying it from a music store requires a separate trip to the music store. Buying it from a mailorder or online retailer requires you to wait for delivery.
When you buy an album from iTunes, you get it in a lossy compression format. With a CD, you get the music with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz @ 16 bit.
When you buy an album with iTunes, you may get a small jpeg of the album cover as an ID3 tag. When you buy a CD, you get an actual physical copy of the image on glossy paper, and usually some interesting material in the liner notes.
When you buy an album from iTunes, it is protected with its DRM technology. You are also tying yourself to playing the songs from iTunes, and are trusting that Apple will continue to develop iTunes and maintain their DRM infrastructure. When you buy a CD from a record store, you get a product with no DRM protection, is able to be played a many output devices of many styles, and has a long enough history to assume that new devices will be produced for a long time to come.
An album bought from iTunes can be burned to CD. A CD bought from a store can be ripped to MP3. Mostly a wash, but burning the slightly lower fidelity iTunes AAC file to CD doesn't give it the quality of the CD. Ripping the CD to MP3 reduces the quality, but you still have the high quality original.
When you buy an album from iTunes, you get a very helpful shopping experience. Searching for songs is faster, there are hypertextual jumps between song, artist, and album. On a particular page, it will show you top selling songs by that artist, and the "people who bought this song also bought..." list. Also, if you use the shopping cart, rather than the 1-click purchase, you get a "Recomendations based on albums in your cart." When you buy an album from a record store, you tend to some teenager who sparked up during his last break asking you "Can I help you find anything?" (to which my response is usually. "You still have them arranged alphabetically by artist, right? I think I'm all set.")
Different people will put different weightings on each of these criteria. If you usually listen to music from only one or two Macintoshes, or an iPod, rarely use actual CDs, have audio equipment that doesn't give noticable differences between CD and MP3 quality, then iTunes is a good deal. If you frequently are on non-Macintosh machines, bounce around on more than three Macs when you listen to music (or for some other reason find the need to "authorize" a Mac with your DRM key prohibitive) and have a quality home entertainment system that can show the differences between a lossy rip and the original CD, then a close to 50% price reduction may not quite be enough for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget offsite storage. A year or so ago I was listening to a piece about the Kennedy family's personal photographer, Jacques Lowe. Besides all of his published photographs that practically single-handedly sold the Camelot image, he had many more unpublished images. To keep all of his important works, he kept them in a safe deposit box at a JP Morgan bank branch, located at 5 World Trade Center. The bank was damaged during the collapse of the Twin Towers and the negatives are believed to have be destroyed.
If it was actually made by the US Government, it can't be covered by copyright (see http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html) The reason it is set up that way, even if it isn't nearly as apparent now, is that it is our government. If they are creating works, they are doing so on our behalf, and we should be the recipients. Copyright has the work-for-hire concept, where an employees work is owned by the employer. For government works, we are the employer.
The exception, or perhaps loophole, depending on your point of view, are works created by private corporations under contract to the government. If it was created by people under contract, then the corporations awarded the contract would likely own the copyright.
According to this message that I read on Bugtraq, http://securityfocus.com/archive/1/342825/2003-10- 30/2003-11-05/2, Chris Sysopal from @stake says "When we reported these issues to Apple they told us that they would have them fixed
in the Panther release timeframe. To be honest, I assumed there would also be
a patch for 10.2. We certainly didn't dictate any specific way of releasing the
fixes. "
This is a little bit different than the one than you seem to be thinking of. In 2000, The NY Times obtained classified documents about the 1953 coup that brought the Shah of Iran into power. They incorrectly redacted the document to preserve their sources and protect some government operatives before publishing it. (See Iranian Coup Plotters Exposed By PDF File)
In this case, the government handed over the document with the naughty bits already blocked out, but didn't release that PDF is more like a collage than like graph paper.
Safari uses the standard Cocoa text area control. Because of this it has spell checking, it just has to be enabled. Right-click in a text area, choose Spelling->Check Spelling As You Type from the menu, and the red dotted underline appears under each misspelled word. I know it works, because I've used it to help me catch a couple of spelling errors in this very message.
From what I understand, Panther's text area window gives some improvements to this feature. (allowing F5 to be used in a manner similar to Auto-complete)
Scully is echoing comments from Tim Berners-Lee during the development of the web. The original proposal for the world wide web specifically mentions Hypercard when describing what the system does.
I'm sorry. I remember too much of the antitrust suit against IBM to fully trust them. I'll thank them for each thing they do to help advance free software, and the computer industry as a whole, but I reserve the right to examine each decision individually.
The ">console" user is convenient for occational text mode access, but if you want it to be the default, you probably want to modify the way loginwindow.app gets run.
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Am I just focused on a particular aspect of the open source landscale? or are there fair number of open source products owned by a corporation with a vested interest in its direction?
And then the moved to an infix syntax and pissed all of them off.
The term hacker was both used and misused long before anyone came up with the term cracker to be someone who breaks into computer systems. It was essentially an attempt to deflect the popular press away from the word hacker, and allow it to regain the former meaning of respect.
It didn't work. The popular press hasn't let go of the word hacker to mean computer criminal. They haven't picked up on the term Cracker. Instead of trying to explain what hacker means , we need to what hacker and cracker mean and what differentiates them. Meanwhile, we are also trying to explain that we are speaking the same language, despite having different definitions for just about everything.
I think we should give up on trying to people to use the term cracker to mean computer criminal. It already has an entirely different (although no less positive) meaning. We can't just play you stole our word, so we'll steal one of yours. The term cracker is evidence that jargon can't be forced, it has to spring up naturally.
Now for why someone who reads slashdot submitted an article that uses the word hacker incorrectly. I have no explanation.
What it seems to me that Apple sees some benefits to open source, and some disadvantages. For different products, the pros and cons of each lead to a determination of what sort of license to use.
Using open source packages like Apache, Python, Perl, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, OpenLDAP, KHTML, and FreeBSD's userland tools decreases their development time. Making systems like NetInfo, Rendezvous, Quicktime Streaming Server Open Source adds to potential wider adoption of their technologies. Using Open Source in these is a benefit to them
Keeping large portions of the OS X and OS X Server systems closed source allows them to collect significant financial rewards from their sale.
Apple seems to be viewing the complete financial picture when deciding a license for a product. The sales point of view: How many units can they sell? The engineering point of view: How long will it take to build. The marketing point of view:Are there enough products out there that work with ours that would make someone buy it. These points are weighed and a course of action chosen.
They aren't the only company with a dual closed source/open source strategy. The Zope company comes to mind. They fund Python development with their PythonLabs subsidiary. (That has always sort of reminded me of the way that SGI bought MIPS to ensure that the CPU their products were built on had continued development.) They create open source packages like ZODB, Zope, and CMF. They also sell packages built off these technologies like ZRS (Zope Replication Server, for replicated ZODBs) Zope4Media (A content management a publishing system) Again, Zope seems to carefully weigh the benefits of community development and wider adoption against the benefits of direct financial remuneration.
It wasn't some guy suddenly deciding to patent software. The Supreme Court decided in Diamond v. Diehr that the USPTO's regulations at the time were unconstitutional. In case you don't follow the link, Diamond v. Diehr was about a method for vulcanizing rubber that used software connected to sensors to determine how best to heat the rubber.
So the USPTO (part of the executive branch of government) was prohibited (by the judicial branch) from following their current regulations. They got no help from Congress (the legislative branch) by creating new laws to help them guide new regulations. The USPTO can't unilaterally revert to their previous rules. Either someone needs to bring a new case to the Supreme Court to challenge the current USPTO regulations, or Congress needs to pass laws that will pass a judicial challenge.
You seem to be jumping to conclusions about my personal opinions or preferences about software and business process patents. By picturing an alternate reality in which software is and always has been patentable, it doesn't mean that I wished that I lived in that reality. It doesn't matter anyway, because we can't change the course of past events. We can't truly determine the effects of a world that always had software patents, and even if we could, we couldn't succeed at emulating that course.
That leads back to the problem, though. We can't go back. Neither side can. Some people may wish that Diamond v. Diehr never happened, but it did. The Supreme Court has forced the USPTO to accept patents for software. Some people may wish that the USPTO awarded software patents earlier, but they didn't and the software industry as it exists today is because the USPTO had its hands off approach.
The question is, what do we do now?
If patents on systems implemented in software were granted from day one, the software industry would be very different than it is today. Other industries, electronics for example, deal with patents and licensing on a day to day basis and the state of the art keeps advancing. One could argue whether it would be better or worse, but at least it would be consistent. What we have today is the worst of both worlds. We have a patent office accepting patents while they have no concept of the state of the art or prior art.
Personally, I feel what the patent office is missing is the idea that computers are designed to be infinitely configurable machines, and that software just sets the machine to a particular configuration. Being able to patent software is like being able to patent a particular Lego layout.
But just to let you know, if it would have been possible to patent Hello World, and if the patent to it had coincided with the publication of the first edition of the book The C Programming Language (long after string output had implemented in software), then the patent would have expired by now.
Patent examimers are supposed to do a check for prior art. Unfortunately, their usual body of work to check from is other patents. From their point of view, useful items are patented, so examining other patent filings is the best place to find already existing inventions.
The problem is, there patent office refused patents on software until forced to by the Supreme Court in the 1981 case Diamond v. Diehr The software industry developed without any consideration to patents, and now the patent office is missing decades of the basic building blocks needed for determing the novel from the mundane.
If you are correct about them planning on reducing their workforce, you could take the announcement this way:
The same way the bundling of MacWrite upped the ante for Macintosh Word Processing programs through the '80s?
When Apple bundled MacWrite with each Mac, the only other word processor was Microsoft Word and eventually WriteNow. After they stopped, WordPerfect, FullWrite, and Nisus was released. As well as integrated word processing programs like MS-Works, GreatWorks and ClarisWorks. (yes, Clarisworks was published by Claris, an Apple subsidiary but the software developers created it without knowing who would eventually publish it.)
Apple spun of its application development to Claris and stopped producing application software specifically because they were too strong of a competitor for a software publisher to compete against in the Mac market. I wonder what changed?
He seems to have little sympathy on the matter, and you probably won't get more out of him than a politely worded patches welcome .
Uh Oh. Looks like we need another Timmy
The part where the OS gets involved is when it uses the same mechanism to associate documents with their application as they do interpreted code with their interpreter.
MIME has a Content-Type mechanism to describe data. In the original MIME specification the authors stated
andJust because the designers of outlook essentially ignored the data description features of MIME didn't mean they had to ignore the warnings of the dangers of executable content. There is no reason why a mail reader should associate a .sh file, or an application/x-shell-script file with a general purpose interpreter, and the people who invented MIME knew this and warned about it.
There is no good reason for a mail program to run hand executable content off to the OS or an interpreter.
What about the case when there are you notice that an exploit is actively being used?
Sure, tell the vendor first so they can start working on a patch; but tell other admins immediately afterwards, so they can start devising their own workarounds.
Even so, they have to time their payola payments to clearchannel, their other promotional efforts (point of purchase displays, magazine advertisement, press journalist junkets, etc.) and the release of the single.
If they gave their entire promotional budget to clearchannel at the beginning, they would probably come back in 3 weeks and say "we can get your single played on x more stations for an extra $y." (for moderate values of x and large values of y) Record companies also wind up with the situation where they can't increase album sales no matter how much they pay clearchannel to promote it.
They know they can get clearchannel to make any song popular for a week. The trick is to use the popularity of the first single as an additional marketing boost for the second single, and then use the long running popularity of the album (based on waves of popularity for each single) to give it legs of its own. (where minimal additional promotion is needed relative to sales.)
There is a difference between a record publisher releasing singles of an artist album, and releasing the whole album piecemeal.
Singles are carefully chosen, and their release carefully timed, to cause an increase in sales of the corresponding album.
Compare the two products.
Buying the album from iTunes gives you the ability to listen t the product immediately. Buying it from a music store requires a separate trip to the music store. Buying it from a mailorder or online retailer requires you to wait for delivery.
When you buy an album from iTunes, you get it in a lossy compression format. With a CD, you get the music with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz @ 16 bit.
When you buy an album with iTunes, you may get a small jpeg of the album cover as an ID3 tag. When you buy a CD, you get an actual physical copy of the image on glossy paper, and usually some interesting material in the liner notes.
When you buy an album from iTunes, it is protected with its DRM technology. You are also tying yourself to playing the songs from iTunes, and are trusting that Apple will continue to develop iTunes and maintain their DRM infrastructure. When you buy a CD from a record store, you get a product with no DRM protection, is able to be played a many output devices of many styles, and has a long enough history to assume that new devices will be produced for a long time to come.
An album bought from iTunes can be burned to CD. A CD bought from a store can be ripped to MP3. Mostly a wash, but burning the slightly lower fidelity iTunes AAC file to CD doesn't give it the quality of the CD. Ripping the CD to MP3 reduces the quality, but you still have the high quality original.
When you buy an album from iTunes, you get a very helpful shopping experience. Searching for songs is faster, there are hypertextual jumps between song, artist, and album. On a particular page, it will show you top selling songs by that artist, and the "people who bought this song also bought..." list. Also, if you use the shopping cart, rather than the 1-click purchase, you get a "Recomendations based on albums in your cart." When you buy an album from a record store, you tend to some teenager who sparked up during his last break asking you "Can I help you find anything?" (to which my response is usually. "You still have them arranged alphabetically by artist, right? I think I'm all set.")
Different people will put different weightings on each of these criteria. If you usually listen to music from only one or two Macintoshes, or an iPod, rarely use actual CDs, have audio equipment that doesn't give noticable differences between CD and MP3 quality, then iTunes is a good deal. If you frequently are on non-Macintosh machines, bounce around on more than three Macs when you listen to music (or for some other reason find the need to "authorize" a Mac with your DRM key prohibitive) and have a quality home entertainment system that can show the differences between a lossy rip and the original CD, then a close to 50% price reduction may not quite be enough for you.