And in the joyous world of American criminal law, that doesn't matter. You take information that the government thinks is harmful, and you make it accessible to people the government thinks is harmful, in a way that the government thinks is harmful, and you're in for a lot of trouble. Sure, you might come out of it just fine in a decade or two, but in the mean time you're branded a traitor by the media, blackballed from your industry, and will almost certainly be placed on every watch list in the country. Thank you, USA PATRIOT Act, for keeping us "safe"!
Apple isn't trying to fight for any particular ideals of freedom. They're fighting to fill a walled garden that people will pay money to use. Things that offend the American right-wing militants will get banned. Things that offend the American left-wing socialists will get banned. Things that piss off people with "complex standards" will get banned. Things that piss off people with "common sense" will get banned.
All that is left is apps that appeal to the middle-of-the-road masses, because that's where Apple's money comes from.
Most forms of payment today (credit cards, paypal, even ACH) are quite reversible.
First, note that PayPal is only slightly more secure than cash, and that's only because Paypal can choose to side with whomever it wants. It is not a bank, and not regulated like a bank. Apart from PR, PayPal doesn't really care what happens to any money you willingly put in its possession. A wise user will keep only money they can afford to lose in PayPal for convenience, and put the rest somewhere safer.
Bank transfers and credit cards are regulated, and the banks have a clear interest in not letting their customers lose money (since that's directly behind their profit). It's common knowledge that any fraud through a bank can be disputed, and the bank will usually be on the complainant's side through the process (because they want the profit from having that money back).
And it's not theoretical. My brother had a laptop stolen from him because he didn't understand how reversible PayPal is, and there are professional scammers who exploit that.
I have been scammed by sellers who charged for items and never sent anything, but my analogy proves nothing more than yours does.
With Bitcoin, if you sell you don't need trust in the buyer. OK, so what about buyers? Well, if you trust the seller, you can just send them the money. For big, trusted brands that's nice and cheap - everyone wins.
Except for the person whose BitCoins were stolen, and used to make the purchase. Since it's untraceable, those big businesses, who have to comply with those silly laws about not laundering money and the like, either can't use BitCoins, or they run the risk of being caught in a laundering (or other fraud) scheme.
The Bitcoin system anticipated this problem years ago and the protocol supports dispute mediation techniques that prevent the mediator from stealing the money [bitcoin.it], which obviously also means you don't have to worry about them being hacked either. It's not fully implemented today (no GUI), which is unfortunate, but these things will come with time.
And until that's used, fools and their money are soon parted. Once it is in widespread use, BitCoin is no better off than PayPal or any other reversible service, because a scammer can simply dispute every transaction, taking the chance that they'll get their money back. Then of course there's the case where a mediator may not actually be neutral, but rather is itself part of the scam.
So honest buyers get screwed when the seller doesn't uphold the deal, honest sellers get screwed when buyers don't uphold the deal, and companies who are big enough to be under constant regulatory watch are saddled with a huge risk. It's cash, with cryptography buzzwords added for flavor.
By the same flawed logic, a briefcase that's locked inside a welded-shut titanium room with constant surveillance cannot be stolen. A BitCoin wallet kept on an always-connected disk with a strong password that's the same password as used on an insecure social network which tells what bar the victim (and his smartphone) frequents, can be easily stolen.
The problem isn't that the cash mechanism itself is somehow flawed... Dollars don't magically leap to pickpockets' hands, and BitCoin wallets don't magically lose their encryption. The problem is that the security burden is put on the user. There are idiots who carry fat wallets in too-small pockets, and there are idiots who won't bother to encrypt their BitCoin wallets.
Proper encryption and backup are hard (for the average uneducated schmuck), though, just like securing a briefcase with your life's savings in it. To avoid that hardship, people will dump their savings into the BitCoin banks, get the certificates, and so on. The reasons for wanting certificates change, but there are still ample reasons.
The sane majority also must refer to history books when dealing with statements made by activist groups and say that they're trying to look more important than they really are, and therefore also lying.
Hence my original point: I must assume everyone's lying. There is as much proof of invisible black Martian spy planes as there is of anyone's claims here.
It filled the need for an anti-corporate moral superiority.
BitCoin was developed from the start to screw over large companies, who invariably require a trail of some kind for significant transactions. It's promoted as the digital equivalent of cash, and just like cash, the only way to trust a transaction is when you implicitly trust the other party. That kind of trust is only feasible for a small business dealing with a small client base, where the natural urge for social behavior still trumps the natural human urge for antisocial greed.
Sure, maybe BitCoin could eventually work... but it'll first evolve a traceable "BitCoin Certificate" that will be exchangeable for BitCoins at a particular place, and those certificates will have a booming economy grow around their trade, because they're easier to secure than actual BitCoins. Then certificates will be created for BitCoins that don't actually exist, but they'll be paired with certificates for BitCoin debt, and BitCoins will be loaned. Eventually, the BitCoins will just be a meaningless wallet locked away on a server, and the certificates will be the real money, and the demand for certificates will fluctuate in relation to the actual value of the BitCoins. Then someone will gripe about how these certificates are no longer fixed to the BitCoin standard, and they're traceable, and we should make a new currency to solve the problems, that's not controlled by Big BitCoin...
Yeah, that's the weird part. My phone has phone numbers, and that's it. Of course, I don't use my phone for much other than phone calls, so I'm pretty secure. I don't even download many apps, just some games now and then. Oh, and there was this one app a friend recommended to me, where I just download it and fill out a survey for a chance to win a $50 Wal-mart gift card! For each person I refer, I'll get another chance to win! Of course they wanted my mailing address for that, but that's okay. I'm expecting a gift card any day now!
A small sample of a radioactive isotope in front of a Geiger counter attached to a GPIO pin, whose value is used by the bootloader to pick which OS to load. If the isotope has decayed (and emitted a particle toward the sensor) recently enough that the pin is high, boot Debian. If the sample has been stable long enough that leakage has grounded the pin, boot Fedora.
This is AWESOME! Another triumph of mad computer science!
I have a few agent business cards in my desk at home. I could claim any one of them gave me a receipt that proves Lee Harvey Oswald's innocence. I could show you a receipt dated November 22, 1963. The agent I name could deny it, of course, but then his denial could just as easily be dismissed as "protecting his job" or some other obvious ploy.
Anon has shown only that they:
have UDIDs, some of which are valid
have the name of an FBI agent
There is no evidence that the UDIDs actually came from the FBI. There is no evidence that Special Agent Stangl is related to the case in anything but name, and any statement from him must be considered questionable, just as any statement from Anonymous must also be questionable.
As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and there is very little actual proof available... just names and numbers mentioned in close proximity.
This is a huge privacy thing, just like any American's Social Security number. You know, that number where the last four digits are used frequently for identification to third parties, the first three are based on where you were born, and the middle two are based on when you were born...
Being a privacy issue doesn't necessarily mean it's kept particularly secure.
On the other hand, finding the names of agents is pretty easy, and dropping one makes for a much juicier story than "AntiSec managed to get a UDID-sniffing trojan into the app store".
In the absence of any further evidence, I must assume that everybody's lying. The real story is that the UDIDs were harvested wirelessly using petahertz radio scanners mounted on the invisible black helicopters flown by the lizard aliens who, due to their shared ancestry with birds, make excellent pilots, even in aircraft that are based on Martian stealth technology (which is why we're giving the Martians our nuclear-powered cars now).
One minor dispute from me: If their main target is a SteamBox console, why make a full-size card? I'll take onboard graphics if the chip on the main board is as powerful as a contemporary daughterboard.
According to a news report of the only similar incident I could find, the man with the knife was walking, and approached the officer with the knife in hand. Though the shooting was eventually determined to be "unjustified", under Washington law, the officer was free to kill if he believed the man to be a threat.
I'm sure in your case you'd think you were saving someone being brutally stabbed to death, but you're just as likely as the officer to have no idea what's really going on.
So my memoirs that I'll finish on my deathbed and publish posthumously should be worthless? I guess my family would be better off if I abandoned writing now, and got another job to get more cold hard cash for them, instead.
The world doesn't need more literature anyway, I guess.
I've been stabbed before, in a dark alleyway. There was blood everywhere, and a kid crouching behind a trashcan. That kid was our cameraman, and my good friend with the prop knife would probably not be too happy to get a bullet wound for making a crappy amateur movie. Even being caught in the act of stabbing, there can always be an exception.
That said..
Both of which I do as I am drawing my firearm.... After all, my first priority is to get the victim to a hospital, not to enact vengeance.
And that's probably enough to satisfy the requirement for using minimal force. Tried yelling and approaching, and neither worked? It might very well be time to shoot. There is of course leniency over whether you should try separating the attacker and victim, or throwing rocks, or stripping naked and streaking past the attacker. Unreasonable options (or ones that likely seemed unreasonable given the moment) aren't expected to be tried, but trying anything before resorting to your weapon is a good sign of where your priorities are.
My point was that the anarchic vigilantism cpu6502 is so fond of is not inherently more legal or moral than the acts being avenged. As a firearm ex-instructor, if I'd heard any student making a serious comment about killing anyone "without hesitation", I would likely fail them immediately. That mentality just isn't safe to be in control of a firearm.
I have never felt sorry for breaking a law per se, only for the harm that I have caused others and the gracelessness of my own behaviors... regardless of whether I was acting within or outside of my legal rights.
Good for you. Perhaps Mr. Bezos will have a change of heart and become a users'-rights fanatic. Perhaps then he'll feel sorry, and risk his company by not complying with a C&D notice. The law is only supposed to represent a consensus (ideally) of baseline morals. If someone's personal ethics raise the bar higher, that's perfectly fine.
this sounds like the ma bell mentality back in the day when you could only hook up AT&T-authorized equipment to the phone network. Your statement has an accuracy of sorts, but it's an old world command-and-control mentality, and the tech support burden [imposed by user control] is getting less all the time as new OS'es have smarter app isolation.
It's exactly the same argument, for the same (surface) reason: In any connected system, one misbehaving device could compromise the integrity of the entire network. While I certainly hope Amazon's infrastructure is a little more stable than that, actually putting openness into a legal framework is an exceedingly difficult task. Where does the open requirement end? Should Kindle users be able to hijack their devices' Whispernet access to feed a WiFi hotspot? What if a botnet of Kindle-impersonating devices starts buying ebooks to launder money?
There are so many pitfalls to current legislative efforts that all have failed quickly. What I'd like to see eventually is something similar to the phone system: Defined standards that the provider must expose, and any standards-compliant device must be allowed. Of course, applying that to a field as broad as "user devices" is an enormous task. I expect that definitions will eventually be reached, but it will take time and yet more generations of devices that offer wide arrays of features, until a particular feature set is molded into a standard.
Do you support gun rights...? Do you believe... people have an intrinsic human right to defend themselves?
No and yes, respectively. While I believe people have a right to be secure, guns do not provide that security. They provide empty comfort. Today, anyone who can gather $1000 can buy some basic body armor online, and be fairly well-protected against most small handguns. Regardless of that, having a gun pointed at you is terrifying, and easily removes clear judgement, so rather than being an effective deterrent, a "defense" gun is just likely to add to the bullets flying around.
Currently, though, practically anyone can get a handgun, get drunk, and kill an innocent bystander because they thought it would be a good idea to shoot cans in the street. While I like the ability to shoot things in a safe manner (and I'll do so myself occasionally), public presence and use of firearms is a hazard, for which I have no good solution.
Some of these gun people sound a little paranoid (with their "need for control"), but they have some good arguments, and maybe someday Microsoft/Amazon/Google/someone else will push out an update so egregious that people will realize they have a fundamental need for control over their own computational technology as well.
That's begging the question, RMS...
In my opinion, what people should first realize is that there are two distinct models: One where you own information, and one where you only use the information. To illustrate with a car analogy (this is Slashdot, after all), it may be compared to owning or renting a car. If you own a car, you can do anything you want with it - rebuild the engine, customize the aerodynamics, or even blow it up (safely, please) if you want. If you rent a car, you can only use it per the details of your rental agreement, but you aren't responsible for maintenance, upgrades, or often even emergency rep
Just as if I see someone stabbing a citizen in a street, I won't hestiate to pull-out my gun and kill the stabber immediately. Don't mistreat people. Payback's a bitch.
Then you'd be guilty of murder. Merely having a gun does not entitle you to take someone else's life. You are first obligated to try everything possible to resolve the situation using minimal force. That means first yelling, then approaching, maybe attempting to separate the assailant and victim (if you can reasonably do so), and attempting to disarm the assailant. Finally, if you have tried everything else, or if you are directly threatened with imminent lethal force, you may use your firearm as a last resort.
"I'm helping karma" is not a legal defense, though it could help your insanity plea.
I'm not settling for anything less than "We're sorry we fucked with your property, we were wrong to do it irrespective of any licensing disputes, and we've irreversibly crippled our own ability to ever do it again. Here's proof and here's the list of files to rename or delete on your own device to make sure that even if we change our minds, we won't be able to do it to you ever again."
Because of course it's perfectly reasonable to expect Amazon to keep up with every licensing lawsuit running through the courts in every jurisdiction. It's apparently also perfectly reasonable to want Amazon to release source code "proof" for a proprietary product, and openly endorse users screwing around in the filesystem of a device they support, opening up their technical support to infinite variety and infinite complications.
Even if they did offer such proof that the original system was removed, any mechanism for remote code execution (whether intentionally present or not) could be abused to reimplement the same function, so the proof itself is meaningless. Even a promise not to do it again is meaningless, because a court order could trump that.
They don't even have a reason to be sorry for altering "your" property. There's a nice "terms of service" contract that you agreed to by using the product, and those terms let Amazon do whatever they want. They had your permission to do what they did, so why should they apologize for it now that somebody regrets that contract?
I'm unwilling to buy a device that I end up not truly owning and controlling.
And manufacturers aren't willing to support or in any way deal with the inconsistent administrative mess of letting you control the devices. Nobody really cares if you buy a device for the hardware, mod it 'til your heart's content, and never let the company know it was turned on. The moment your untrusted device starts dealing with their network, though, you become a threat. So go ahead, and use your offline reader. The companies that offer connected devices don't want to deal with your need for "control", anyway.
None of those are patentable, though, because the obvious claims you could make in a patent are already prevalent in prior art. However, you could patent other gestures that are either novel in themselves, or the implementation to recognize it would be novel. Here's a few ideas:
Run finger around the edge of a mobile device to unlock it
Command a device by pointing a flat hand at it
Mute a "commanded" (per above) device by lowering an open hand slowly
Turn off a "commanded" device by closing your flat hand into a fist quickly
Open a door by approaching it directly while carrying a large object.
Of course prior art was misunderstood. It usually is, including the misunderstanding that Groklaw is propagating. For the purposes of dismissing a patent, prior art does not just have to be something similar, but must be something that is, in whole or in part, exactly the same as what's claimed in the patent. If the patent claims a specific processor function that the prior art didn't have, it's not prior art!
Software is algorithms, and algorithms are mathematics. That's why they should never be allowed to be patented in the first place, which would have avoided all this Apple v. Samsung trial about bounceback anyway.
The algorithms are not patentable, but their assembly into a system is, just like a screw conveyor is not patentable, but its use in a new material feeder is.
That's okay. There's a long way to go before we hit those limits.
I have a friend who is involved in amateur mileage competitions. His car gets (as I recall) over 80 MPG, and his motorcycle gets something like 100, at highway speeds. That's accomplished mainly with aerodynamics and engine tuning. Safety and vehicle integrity are not altered.
Slashdot Mirror
And in the joyous world of American criminal law, that doesn't matter. You take information that the government thinks is harmful, and you make it accessible to people the government thinks is harmful, in a way that the government thinks is harmful, and you're in for a lot of trouble. Sure, you might come out of it just fine in a decade or two, but in the mean time you're branded a traitor by the media, blackballed from your industry, and will almost certainly be placed on every watch list in the country. Thank you, USA PATRIOT Act, for keeping us "safe"!
Exactly.
Apple isn't trying to fight for any particular ideals of freedom. They're fighting to fill a walled garden that people will pay money to use. Things that offend the American right-wing militants will get banned. Things that offend the American left-wing socialists will get banned. Things that piss off people with "complex standards" will get banned. Things that piss off people with "common sense" will get banned.
All that is left is apps that appeal to the middle-of-the-road masses, because that's where Apple's money comes from.
Most forms of payment today (credit cards, paypal, even ACH) are quite reversible.
First, note that PayPal is only slightly more secure than cash, and that's only because Paypal can choose to side with whomever it wants. It is not a bank, and not regulated like a bank. Apart from PR, PayPal doesn't really care what happens to any money you willingly put in its possession. A wise user will keep only money they can afford to lose in PayPal for convenience, and put the rest somewhere safer.
Bank transfers and credit cards are regulated, and the banks have a clear interest in not letting their customers lose money (since that's directly behind their profit). It's common knowledge that any fraud through a bank can be disputed, and the bank will usually be on the complainant's side through the process (because they want the profit from having that money back).
And it's not theoretical. My brother had a laptop stolen from him because he didn't understand how reversible PayPal is, and there are professional scammers who exploit that.
I have been scammed by sellers who charged for items and never sent anything, but my analogy proves nothing more than yours does.
With Bitcoin, if you sell you don't need trust in the buyer. OK, so what about buyers? Well, if you trust the seller, you can just send them the money. For big, trusted brands that's nice and cheap - everyone wins.
Except for the person whose BitCoins were stolen, and used to make the purchase. Since it's untraceable, those big businesses, who have to comply with those silly laws about not laundering money and the like, either can't use BitCoins, or they run the risk of being caught in a laundering (or other fraud) scheme.
The Bitcoin system anticipated this problem years ago and the protocol supports dispute mediation techniques that prevent the mediator from stealing the money [bitcoin.it], which obviously also means you don't have to worry about them being hacked either. It's not fully implemented today (no GUI), which is unfortunate, but these things will come with time.
And until that's used, fools and their money are soon parted. Once it is in widespread use, BitCoin is no better off than PayPal or any other reversible service, because a scammer can simply dispute every transaction, taking the chance that they'll get their money back. Then of course there's the case where a mediator may not actually be neutral, but rather is itself part of the scam.
So honest buyers get screwed when the seller doesn't uphold the deal, honest sellers get screwed when buyers don't uphold the deal, and companies who are big enough to be under constant regulatory watch are saddled with a huge risk. It's cash, with cryptography buzzwords added for flavor.
By the same flawed logic, a briefcase that's locked inside a welded-shut titanium room with constant surveillance cannot be stolen. A BitCoin wallet kept on an always-connected disk with a strong password that's the same password as used on an insecure social network which tells what bar the victim (and his smartphone) frequents, can be easily stolen.
The problem isn't that the cash mechanism itself is somehow flawed... Dollars don't magically leap to pickpockets' hands, and BitCoin wallets don't magically lose their encryption. The problem is that the security burden is put on the user. There are idiots who carry fat wallets in too-small pockets, and there are idiots who won't bother to encrypt their BitCoin wallets.
*slow applause*
Well done, sir. Your reading comprehension is astounding.
Proper encryption and backup are hard (for the average uneducated schmuck), though, just like securing a briefcase with your life's savings in it. To avoid that hardship, people will dump their savings into the BitCoin banks, get the certificates, and so on. The reasons for wanting certificates change, but there are still ample reasons.
The sane majority also must refer to history books when dealing with statements made by activist groups and say that they're trying to look more important than they really are, and therefore also lying.
Hence my original point: I must assume everyone's lying. There is as much proof of invisible black Martian spy planes as there is of anyone's claims here.
It filled the need for an anti-corporate moral superiority.
BitCoin was developed from the start to screw over large companies, who invariably require a trail of some kind for significant transactions. It's promoted as the digital equivalent of cash, and just like cash, the only way to trust a transaction is when you implicitly trust the other party. That kind of trust is only feasible for a small business dealing with a small client base, where the natural urge for social behavior still trumps the natural human urge for antisocial greed.
Sure, maybe BitCoin could eventually work... but it'll first evolve a traceable "BitCoin Certificate" that will be exchangeable for BitCoins at a particular place, and those certificates will have a booming economy grow around their trade, because they're easier to secure than actual BitCoins. Then certificates will be created for BitCoins that don't actually exist, but they'll be paired with certificates for BitCoin debt, and BitCoins will be loaned. Eventually, the BitCoins will just be a meaningless wallet locked away on a server, and the certificates will be the real money, and the demand for certificates will fluctuate in relation to the actual value of the BitCoins. Then someone will gripe about how these certificates are no longer fixed to the BitCoin standard, and they're traceable, and we should make a new currency to solve the problems, that's not controlled by Big BitCoin...
Yeah, that's the weird part. My phone has phone numbers, and that's it. Of course, I don't use my phone for much other than phone calls, so I'm pretty secure. I don't even download many apps, just some games now and then. Oh, and there was this one app a friend recommended to me, where I just download it and fill out a survey for a chance to win a $50 Wal-mart gift card! For each person I refer, I'll get another chance to win! Of course they wanted my mailing address for that, but that's okay. I'm expecting a gift card any day now!
A small sample of a radioactive isotope in front of a Geiger counter attached to a GPIO pin, whose value is used by the bootloader to pick which OS to load. If the isotope has decayed (and emitted a particle toward the sensor) recently enough that the pin is high, boot Debian. If the sample has been stable long enough that leakage has grounded the pin, boot Fedora.
This is AWESOME! Another triumph of mad computer science!
I have a few agent business cards in my desk at home. I could claim any one of them gave me a receipt that proves Lee Harvey Oswald's innocence. I could show you a receipt dated November 22, 1963. The agent I name could deny it, of course, but then his denial could just as easily be dismissed as "protecting his job" or some other obvious ploy.
Anon has shown only that they:
There is no evidence that the UDIDs actually came from the FBI. There is no evidence that Special Agent Stangl is related to the case in anything but name, and any statement from him must be considered questionable, just as any statement from Anonymous must also be questionable.
As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and there is very little actual proof available... just names and numbers mentioned in close proximity.
This is a huge privacy thing, just like any American's Social Security number. You know, that number where the last four digits are used frequently for identification to third parties, the first three are based on where you were born, and the middle two are based on when you were born...
Being a privacy issue doesn't necessarily mean it's kept particularly secure.
On the other hand, finding the names of agents is pretty easy, and dropping one makes for a much juicier story than "AntiSec managed to get a UDID-sniffing trojan into the app store".
In the absence of any further evidence, I must assume that everybody's lying. The real story is that the UDIDs were harvested wirelessly using petahertz radio scanners mounted on the invisible black helicopters flown by the lizard aliens who, due to their shared ancestry with birds, make excellent pilots, even in aircraft that are based on Martian stealth technology (which is why we're giving the Martians our nuclear-powered cars now).
Peak maple.
One minor dispute from me: If their main target is a SteamBox console, why make a full-size card? I'll take onboard graphics if the chip on the main board is as powerful as a contemporary daughterboard.
According to a news report of the only similar incident I could find, the man with the knife was walking, and approached the officer with the knife in hand. Though the shooting was eventually determined to be "unjustified", under Washington law, the officer was free to kill if he believed the man to be a threat.
I'm sure in your case you'd think you were saving someone being brutally stabbed to death, but you're just as likely as the officer to have no idea what's really going on.
So my memoirs that I'll finish on my deathbed and publish posthumously should be worthless? I guess my family would be better off if I abandoned writing now, and got another job to get more cold hard cash for them, instead.
The world doesn't need more literature anyway, I guess.
I've been stabbed before, in a dark alleyway. There was blood everywhere, and a kid crouching behind a trashcan. That kid was our cameraman, and my good friend with the prop knife would probably not be too happy to get a bullet wound for making a crappy amateur movie. Even being caught in the act of stabbing, there can always be an exception.
That said..
Both of which I do as I am drawing my firearm. ... After all, my first priority is to get the victim to a hospital, not to enact vengeance.
And that's probably enough to satisfy the requirement for using minimal force. Tried yelling and approaching, and neither worked? It might very well be time to shoot. There is of course leniency over whether you should try separating the attacker and victim, or throwing rocks, or stripping naked and streaking past the attacker. Unreasonable options (or ones that likely seemed unreasonable given the moment) aren't expected to be tried, but trying anything before resorting to your weapon is a good sign of where your priorities are.
My point was that the anarchic vigilantism cpu6502 is so fond of is not inherently more legal or moral than the acts being avenged. As a firearm ex-instructor, if I'd heard any student making a serious comment about killing anyone "without hesitation", I would likely fail them immediately. That mentality just isn't safe to be in control of a firearm.
A Good Samaritan defense usually does not override the requirement to use minimal force.
I have never felt sorry for breaking a law per se, only for the harm that I have caused others and the gracelessness of my own behaviors... regardless of whether I was acting within or outside of my legal rights.
Good for you. Perhaps Mr. Bezos will have a change of heart and become a users'-rights fanatic. Perhaps then he'll feel sorry, and risk his company by not complying with a C&D notice. The law is only supposed to represent a consensus (ideally) of baseline morals. If someone's personal ethics raise the bar higher, that's perfectly fine.
this sounds like the ma bell mentality back in the day when you could only hook up AT&T-authorized equipment to the phone network. Your statement has an accuracy of sorts, but it's an old world command-and-control mentality, and the tech support burden [imposed by user control] is getting less all the time as new OS'es have smarter app isolation.
It's exactly the same argument, for the same (surface) reason: In any connected system, one misbehaving device could compromise the integrity of the entire network. While I certainly hope Amazon's infrastructure is a little more stable than that, actually putting openness into a legal framework is an exceedingly difficult task. Where does the open requirement end? Should Kindle users be able to hijack their devices' Whispernet access to feed a WiFi hotspot? What if a botnet of Kindle-impersonating devices starts buying ebooks to launder money?
There are so many pitfalls to current legislative efforts that all have failed quickly. What I'd like to see eventually is something similar to the phone system: Defined standards that the provider must expose, and any standards-compliant device must be allowed. Of course, applying that to a field as broad as "user devices" is an enormous task. I expect that definitions will eventually be reached, but it will take time and yet more generations of devices that offer wide arrays of features, until a particular feature set is molded into a standard.
Do you support gun rights...? Do you believe ... people have an intrinsic human right to defend themselves?
No and yes, respectively. While I believe people have a right to be secure, guns do not provide that security. They provide empty comfort. Today, anyone who can gather $1000 can buy some basic body armor online, and be fairly well-protected against most small handguns. Regardless of that, having a gun pointed at you is terrifying, and easily removes clear judgement, so rather than being an effective deterrent, a "defense" gun is just likely to add to the bullets flying around.
Currently, though, practically anyone can get a handgun, get drunk, and kill an innocent bystander because they thought it would be a good idea to shoot cans in the street. While I like the ability to shoot things in a safe manner (and I'll do so myself occasionally), public presence and use of firearms is a hazard, for which I have no good solution.
Some of these gun people sound a little paranoid (with their "need for control"), but they have some good arguments, and maybe someday Microsoft/Amazon/Google/someone else will push out an update so egregious that people will realize they have a fundamental need for control over their own computational technology as well.
That's begging the question, RMS...
In my opinion, what people should first realize is that there are two distinct models: One where you own information, and one where you only use the information. To illustrate with a car analogy (this is Slashdot, after all), it may be compared to owning or renting a car. If you own a car, you can do anything you want with it - rebuild the engine, customize the aerodynamics, or even blow it up (safely, please) if you want. If you rent a car, you can only use it per the details of your rental agreement, but you aren't responsible for maintenance, upgrades, or often even emergency rep
Just as if I see someone stabbing a citizen in a street, I won't hestiate to pull-out my gun and kill the stabber immediately. Don't mistreat people. Payback's a bitch.
Then you'd be guilty of murder. Merely having a gun does not entitle you to take someone else's life. You are first obligated to try everything possible to resolve the situation using minimal force. That means first yelling, then approaching, maybe attempting to separate the assailant and victim (if you can reasonably do so), and attempting to disarm the assailant. Finally, if you have tried everything else, or if you are directly threatened with imminent lethal force, you may use your firearm as a last resort.
"I'm helping karma" is not a legal defense, though it could help your insanity plea.
I'm not settling for anything less than "We're sorry we fucked with your property, we were wrong to do it irrespective of any licensing disputes, and we've irreversibly crippled our own ability to ever do it again. Here's proof and here's the list of files to rename or delete on your own device to make sure that even if we change our minds, we won't be able to do it to you ever again."
Because of course it's perfectly reasonable to expect Amazon to keep up with every licensing lawsuit running through the courts in every jurisdiction. It's apparently also perfectly reasonable to want Amazon to release source code "proof" for a proprietary product, and openly endorse users screwing around in the filesystem of a device they support, opening up their technical support to infinite variety and infinite complications.
Even if they did offer such proof that the original system was removed, any mechanism for remote code execution (whether intentionally present or not) could be abused to reimplement the same function, so the proof itself is meaningless. Even a promise not to do it again is meaningless, because a court order could trump that.
They don't even have a reason to be sorry for altering "your" property. There's a nice "terms of service" contract that you agreed to by using the product, and those terms let Amazon do whatever they want. They had your permission to do what they did, so why should they apologize for it now that somebody regrets that contract?
I'm unwilling to buy a device that I end up not truly owning and controlling.
And manufacturers aren't willing to support or in any way deal with the inconsistent administrative mess of letting you control the devices. Nobody really cares if you buy a device for the hardware, mod it 'til your heart's content, and never let the company know it was turned on. The moment your untrusted device starts dealing with their network, though, you become a threat. So go ahead, and use your offline reader. The companies that offer connected devices don't want to deal with your need for "control", anyway.
None of those are patentable, though, because the obvious claims you could make in a patent are already prevalent in prior art. However, you could patent other gestures that are either novel in themselves, or the implementation to recognize it would be novel. Here's a few ideas:
Of course prior art was misunderstood. It usually is, including the misunderstanding that Groklaw is propagating. For the purposes of dismissing a patent, prior art does not just have to be something similar, but must be something that is, in whole or in part, exactly the same as what's claimed in the patent. If the patent claims a specific processor function that the prior art didn't have, it's not prior art!
Software is algorithms, and algorithms are mathematics. That's why they should never be allowed to be patented in the first place, which would have avoided all this Apple v. Samsung trial about bounceback anyway.
The algorithms are not patentable, but their assembly into a system is, just like a screw conveyor is not patentable, but its use in a new material feeder is.
That's okay. There's a long way to go before we hit those limits.
I have a friend who is involved in amateur mileage competitions. His car gets (as I recall) over 80 MPG, and his motorcycle gets something like 100, at highway speeds. That's accomplished mainly with aerodynamics and engine tuning. Safety and vehicle integrity are not altered.