I know this is an American settlement, but do you think Microsofts behaviour should be regulated in the rest of the world as well? How would you go about that?
So, someone has invented a data compression technique, and applied it over a communication channel. The only original thing in the article was the clever marketing ploy to describe this old technique as something new and wonderful...
Ok, since there is not - and has never been - any reason to suppress academic research, I openly invite Prof. Felten to study and publish matters realted to the encryption involved in Adobe's E-book reader and in the ways DVD's are protected, and in any other controversial case. After all, he seems to be the only one who has an explicit permission to speak freely on such matters!
A whole wall panel for so little. What I would like is a glorified patch cable, with two bisexual ends. Find a socket that seems to have some working equipment connected to it, disconnect, plug your cable in, and reconnect what ever it was. Plug the other end in your laptop, and also there is a free end for the next guy and his laptop. Enough "intelligence" to handle 10/100Mbit conversions in all four directions, so it makes what ever old/new equipmen fit what ever old/new network, and to adapt to the needs of straight/crossed cabling if both ends turn out to be hubs or PCs.
Preferably no power needed, eating a few electrons from the signal wires, or at least a built-in battery for the next zillion years... Price wouldn't matter, as long as most everyone could afford one... Is this really too much to ask?
Outside the US of A, many countries have strict laws against assisting foreign powers in their spying, and rightly so. I suppose knowingly installing backdoors might fall under such clauses. I would not dare to install or recommend installing McAffees scanners on sensitive networks without seeking legal advice!
Of course McAffee et al wanted a signature for the thing, and this was the best way to formulate the question. Besides, now they can produce a spevif Lantern-detector, and sell under the counter for a high price - and sell the names of the buyers to FBI. Ah the beauty of the free market...
If you can get the powers that be to install one piece of software on your PC, ask for VmWare. Once that is in, you can install your own Linux (or even Windows -yuck!) environment, and be the king of the hill anyway. Most likely they won't even know what they are giving you...
I think it is pretty obvious that one of the main purposes of this move is to exclude Open Source development from this platform. Not many contributors to OS software are willing to pay such amounts, and you can bet there is a clause that prevents people from sharing one MyServices license even inside the same project.
As has already been said, there needs to be something for people to work on, and someone to coordinate all that work. Nothing good will come of merely announcing "hey, let's all get together and write a great program". Someone needs to decide what to write, to start doing it, and to keep the process on track.
Still, you can start with very little, version 0.0.0.1 may not need much more than statement of the goals, and just a bit of code. Version 0.0.0.2 might have some of the major internal APIs defined, a sketch of the user interface, and a detail or two in place. Even at this point it is pretty hard for anyone to contribute anything except opinions. About at version 0.0.0.20 you should have the main building blocks defined (in text), the interfaces between them, and dummy code that does not yet do anything, but does exist. That is the first moment people can see where to put their code, and how to write it. There can still be huge undefined areas ( a web interface goes here, a file system there, an intelligent player AI here, some robotics there, and somewhere we need a booster rocket to get off the ground...)
Even if you do not get many people involved in the beginning, optimize your project infrastructure during those early moments, make everything available and visible, cultivate relationships with the most promising participants, and gain their respect by showing some enlightened leadership. Listen to reasonable suggestions, but cut through with decisions.
Still, expect to do a lot of the work yourself, that's why it is *your* open source project. Linus may claim to take credit for lots of other people's work, but I bet he still works a lot on the kernel. It will take years of time, a great idea, and a great amount of respect and skill and hard work to get there.
Just build another machine exactly like the original. Don't copy any code from the original, but use all the GPL'd software you can, and provide all the source on a CD. Market this heavily, with ads that look like the original DiskZerver. Wait until their legal deparment jumps, and see them in court!
If any backdoor or escrow scheme is to be acceptable for the rest of the world, it must make sure that foreign governments have access to any and all encrypted communications used by US agencies suspected of industial espionage.
There is good reason to suspect that Osama bin Laden has used encryption while discussing plans for terrorism. This has prompted USA to consider laws to regulate encryption, so that the USA can always listen to such discussions.
There is even more reason to suspect that Osama bin Laden has been eating olives while discussing plans for terrorism. Therefore it would be much more effective to mandate all olive stones to carry a hidden microphone that would record and broadcast all discussions taking place in its vicinity, easily catchin the political opponents - I mean terrorists.
Some would say that it would be extremely difficult to make sure that every olive would carry its microphone. All it would take is an international treaty mandating microphones to be installed in all prepackaged olives, and outlawing any home production. Then some powerful international orgization - or the US government - could go out and bomb all olive producers who do not comply with the microphone directive. Soon nobody would dare to produce rogue olives!
Although this may sound like a totally unrealistic plan, it is many ways more likely to succeed than any plan limiting the use of encryption. For the first, olives, small as they are, are physical items that will have to be grown somewhere, pickled and processed, and marketed. All this leaves a physical trail of physical olives moving around. On the other hand, cryptographic tools are ethereal words, easily transmitted by whisper, by graffiti, and other totally intraceable means. Besides, most of them are already published in books all around the world! And once an olive is eaten, the stone is discarded, and a new olive must be acquired, hopefully from a compliant source. Not so with crypto tools, they can be used over and over again, so if the foreign competition - I mean the terrorists - have already managed to gain access to some crypto tools, they can keep using them for ever.
Besides, by betting its reputation on microphoning all olives, the US Government would make itself much less of a laughing stock than if they tried launch a campaign to limit the disucussion and use of encryption!
either we take less clients, less money, more quality work or I am leaving
No boss can accept that you - a mere worker - tell the company to take less money! Not unless the company has so many problems that even a boss can see that something drastic needs to be done, and then it is too late!
No, you have to tell him to take less clients, charge them more so you can take the time to do things right, make more profit, and avoid all the complaints and expensive modifications and overrun schedules and/or whatever problems the boss thinks the company is having.
Or, do it all yourself! You have earlier established how long such a project takes. Now you can do the work much faster, with all your reuse and better knowledge of the systems. So, let the boss have a quarter of the advance, and use three quarters for yourself! Take an extra hour to clean up the code you are working on. Take a day to make a routine more general! Every week, add to the collection of documented tools you are using.
In the end your boss is as happy, since he doesn't know you could work any faster; you are happier, as you have time to do some things right, and the company is happy, because in the end you produce better quality for the customers, who stop whining and come back for more. Probably you also end up working even faster - remember to reserve more time for the important tasks!
If none of this works for you, abandon the sinking shop! Best of luck!
First offer at 5.000.000, any lower?
Ah, the gentleman in uniform, 50.000 it is!
Come on, folks, you can go lower than that! Do I hear 10.000? Anybody dare to bid 5.000? Ah, thank you! 5.000 it is, for the schoolboy in the back row.
Well, folks, this is getting interesting. Who has the guts to do it for 500? Come on, Three times they hava managed to cut the price by a factor of 10, can you do the fourth time? What, no bids?
I hate to say, but 5000 is the best bid so far. Going once!... Going twice! Last chance, folks!
Anybody want to send an anonymous letter to MPAA complaining that pirated materials are distributed from 204.253.162.16 ? Let them try to shut down the connection and see how EFF would react?
I don't understand how these "audits" can possibly work. How can they prove that I have notpaid for the copy I am using, even if I can not be bothered to find any documentation? Isn't one of the main principles of western law that I am not guilty unless and until prven beyond reasonable doubt?
I don't think there are any practical uses for such a conversion tool that would make it worth $99. I doubt it was somehow more functional that the Ebook reader.
I can think of at least two valid reasons to break the encryption:
- I have a blind friend who owns a speech synthesis card. Getting the "book" out of encrypted format would allow him to use other tools to extract the text and have the machine read it aloud for him.
- All that goes under "fair use", like copying a few lines for a quotation, making personal backup copies, and doing word frequency analysis and other studies.
Anyone know what is the situation in EU? I have heard rumours of bad things coming - could someone provide hard facts so I know what to write to local politicians.
It has come to my attention that you asked the FBI to arrest Dmitri Sklyarov on grounds of delivering a speech at an academic conference. You may now have retracted the original request for practical reasons, but you still
seem to be supporting the laws that made such act possible. This I find to be morally and ethically wrong.
Therefore I state that I will not purchase a single Adobe product, and that I will advice all my customers, friends, and family to do likewise until all of the following have come to pass:
a) Dmitri Sklyarov is free, and has received a reasonable compensation for the time he has been imprisoned,
b) You have publicly denounced your support for the laws that made this farce possible,
c) You have taken some concrete and effective steps to free Sklyarov and to repel the unjust laws that were used for his imprisonment.
Yours sincerely
etc
I hope some native speaker of American English will correct the inevitable typos and grammatical errors, and that others may find this a useful template for a letter. If not, post good reasons why, and come up with a better letter...
Small improvement: Install, disconnect net, disable services, set up Ipchains (or iptables) to allow only connection to your vendors update site, connect, download upgrades, open your iptables where public access is really needed. Such Iptables scripts should be part of every distribution!
There seems to be some agreement that personal names, copyrights, etc. are harmful. The opinions here seem to be divided on the usefulness of successfull messages "Driver Foo loaded OK and detected 2 Foo cards at oxF00 and oxBAR". Those messages annoy some, and are very useful for some. So, why not add a boot parameter, a key, or something, to make them visible when needed. When not needed, they could be kept away from confusing the poor users...
From the EULA:
(c) Open Source. Recipient's license rights to the Software are conditioned upon Recipient (i) not distributing such Software, in whole or in part, in conjunction with Potentially Viral Software (as defined below); and
The way I read this is that even if I pay for the toolkit, I may not use it if I distribute any GPL'd software.
So, if my shop sells one RedHat CD, I can not use the SDK for developing anything!
This gets horribly close to free speach issues, and very close to "reasonable conditions". IANAL, but probably this kind of clause would be laughed out of the court here in Denmark! Someone want to try?
And in 2005 the Martians come to demand compensation when the rover accidentally crashes in their capital and kills two high priests. They demand the unconditional surrender of the following individuals:
Firs post
First post
Hot grits
Kilroy was here
goats.cx
As all of those have been seen frequenting slashdot, they will nuke the slashdot site from the orbit if said persons are not delivered to Mars within a week.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is an American settlement, but do you think Microsofts behaviour should be regulated in the rest of the world as well? How would you go about that?
So, someone has invented a data compression technique, and applied it over a communication channel. The only original thing in the article was the clever marketing ploy to describe this old technique as something new and wonderful...
Ok, since there is not - and has never been - any reason to suppress academic research, I openly invite Prof. Felten to study and publish matters realted to the encryption involved in Adobe's E-book reader and in the ways DVD's are protected, and in any other controversial case. After all, he seems to be the only one who has an explicit permission to speak freely on such matters!
A whole wall panel for so little. What I would like is a glorified patch cable, with two bisexual ends. Find a socket that seems to have some working equipment connected to it, disconnect, plug your cable in, and reconnect what ever it was. Plug the other end in your laptop, and also there is a free end for the next guy and his laptop. Enough "intelligence" to handle 10/100Mbit conversions in all four directions, so it makes what ever old/new equipmen fit what ever old/new network, and to adapt to the needs of straight/crossed cabling if both ends turn out to be hubs or PCs. Preferably no power needed, eating a few electrons from the signal wires, or at least a built-in battery for the next zillion years... Price wouldn't matter, as long as most everyone could afford one... Is this really too much to ask?
Outside the US of A, many countries have strict laws against assisting foreign powers in their spying, and rightly so. I suppose knowingly installing backdoors might fall under such clauses. I would not dare to install or recommend installing McAffees scanners on sensitive networks without seeking legal advice!
Of course McAffee et al wanted a signature for the thing, and this was the best way to formulate the question. Besides, now they can produce a spevif Lantern-detector, and sell under the counter for a high price - and sell the names of the buyers to FBI. Ah the beauty of the free market...
Some use (and justification!) for all those homebrew experiments that somehow ended tasting like ********
If you can get the powers that be to install one piece of software on your PC, ask for VmWare. Once that is in, you can install your own Linux (or even Windows -yuck!) environment, and be the king of the hill anyway. Most likely they won't even know what they are giving you...
I think it is pretty obvious that one of the main purposes of this move is to exclude Open Source development from this platform. Not many contributors to OS software are willing to pay such amounts, and you can bet there is a clause that prevents people from sharing one MyServices license even inside the same project.
Still, you can start with very little, version 0.0.0.1 may not need much more than statement of the goals, and just a bit of code. Version 0.0.0.2 might have some of the major internal APIs defined, a sketch of the user interface, and a detail or two in place. Even at this point it is pretty hard for anyone to contribute anything except opinions. About at version 0.0.0.20 you should have the main building blocks defined (in text), the interfaces between them, and dummy code that does not yet do anything, but does exist. That is the first moment people can see where to put their code, and how to write it. There can still be huge undefined areas ( a web interface goes here, a file system there, an intelligent player AI here, some robotics there, and somewhere we need a booster rocket to get off the ground...)
Even if you do not get many people involved in the beginning, optimize your project infrastructure during those early moments, make everything available and visible, cultivate relationships with the most promising participants, and gain their respect by showing some enlightened leadership. Listen to reasonable suggestions, but cut through with decisions.
Still, expect to do a lot of the work yourself, that's why it is *your* open source project. Linus may claim to take credit for lots of other people's work, but I bet he still works a lot on the kernel. It will take years of time, a great idea, and a great amount of respect and skill and hard work to get there.
Best of luck, anyway!
Just build another machine exactly like the original. Don't copy any code from the original, but use all the GPL'd software you can, and provide all the source on a CD. Market this heavily, with ads that look like the original DiskZerver. Wait until their legal deparment jumps, and see them in court!
If any backdoor or escrow scheme is to be acceptable for the rest of the world, it must make sure that foreign governments have access to any and all encrypted communications used by US agencies suspected of industial espionage.
There is even more reason to suspect that Osama bin Laden has been eating olives while discussing plans for terrorism. Therefore it would be much more effective to mandate all olive stones to carry a hidden microphone that would record and broadcast all discussions taking place in its vicinity, easily catchin the political opponents - I mean terrorists.
Some would say that it would be extremely difficult to make sure that every olive would carry its microphone. All it would take is an international treaty mandating microphones to be installed in all prepackaged olives, and outlawing any home production. Then some powerful international orgization - or the US government - could go out and bomb all olive producers who do not comply with the microphone directive. Soon nobody would dare to produce rogue olives!
Although this may sound like a totally unrealistic plan, it is many ways more likely to succeed than any plan limiting the use of encryption. For the first, olives, small as they are, are physical items that will have to be grown somewhere, pickled and processed, and marketed. All this leaves a physical trail of physical olives moving around. On the other hand, cryptographic tools are ethereal words, easily transmitted by whisper, by graffiti, and other totally intraceable means. Besides, most of them are already published in books all around the world! And once an olive is eaten, the stone is discarded, and a new olive must be acquired, hopefully from a compliant source. Not so with crypto tools, they can be used over and over again, so if the foreign competition - I mean the terrorists - have already managed to gain access to some crypto tools, they can keep using them for ever.
Besides, by betting its reputation on microphoning all olives, the US Government would make itself much less of a laughing stock than if they tried launch a campaign to limit the disucussion and use of encryption!
No boss can accept that you - a mere worker - tell the company to take less money! Not unless the company has so many problems that even a boss can see that something drastic needs to be done, and then it is too late!
No, you have to tell him to take less clients, charge them more so you can take the time to do things right, make more profit, and avoid all the complaints and expensive modifications and overrun schedules and/or whatever problems the boss thinks the company is having.
Or, do it all yourself! You have earlier established how long such a project takes. Now you can do the work much faster, with all your reuse and better knowledge of the systems. So, let the boss have a quarter of the advance, and use three quarters for yourself! Take an extra hour to clean up the code you are working on. Take a day to make a routine more general! Every week, add to the collection of documented tools you are using. In the end your boss is as happy, since he doesn't know you could work any faster; you are happier, as you have time to do some things right, and the company is happy, because in the end you produce better quality for the customers, who stop whining and come back for more. Probably you also end up working even faster - remember to reserve more time for the important tasks!
If none of this works for you, abandon the sinking shop! Best of luck!
First offer at 5.000.000, any lower? ... Going twice! Last chance, folks!
Ah, the gentleman in uniform, 50.000 it is!
Come on, folks, you can go lower than that! Do I hear 10.000? Anybody dare to bid 5.000? Ah, thank you! 5.000 it is, for the schoolboy in the back row.
Well, folks, this is getting interesting. Who has the guts to do it for 500? Come on, Three times they hava managed to cut the price by a factor of 10, can you do the fourth time? What, no bids?
I hate to say, but 5000 is the best bid so far. Going once!
Anybody want to send an anonymous letter to MPAA complaining that pirated materials are distributed from 204.253.162.16 ? Let them try to shut down the connection and see how EFF would react?
No, this is a laminating process whereas the Damascus process is not, according to Scientific American.
I don't understand how these "audits" can possibly work. How can they prove that I have notpaid for the copy I am using, even if I can not be bothered to find any documentation? Isn't one of the main principles of western law that I am not guilty unless and until prven beyond reasonable doubt?
I can think of at least two valid reasons to break the encryption:
- I have a blind friend who owns a speech synthesis card. Getting the "book" out of encrypted format would allow him to use other tools to extract the text and have the machine read it aloud for him.
- All that goes under "fair use", like copying a few lines for a quotation, making personal backup copies, and doing word frequency analysis and other studies.
Anyone know what is the situation in EU? I have heard rumours of bad things coming - could someone provide hard facts so I know what to write to local politicians.
It has come to my attention that you asked the FBI to arrest Dmitri Sklyarov on grounds of delivering a speech at an academic conference. You may now have retracted the original request for practical reasons, but you still seem to be supporting the laws that made such act possible. This I find to be morally and ethically wrong.
Therefore I state that I will not purchase a single Adobe product, and that I will advice all my customers, friends, and family to do likewise until all of the following have come to pass:
a) Dmitri Sklyarov is free, and has received a reasonable compensation for the time he has been imprisoned,
b) You have publicly denounced your support for the laws that made this farce possible,
c) You have taken some concrete and effective steps to free Sklyarov and to repel the unjust laws that were used for his imprisonment.
Yours sincerely etc
I hope some native speaker of American English will correct the inevitable typos and grammatical errors, and that others may find this a useful template for a letter. If not, post good reasons why, and come up with a better letter...
Small improvement: Install, disconnect net, disable services, set up Ipchains (or iptables) to allow only connection to your vendors update site, connect, download upgrades, open your iptables where public access is really needed. Such Iptables scripts should be part of every distribution!
There seems to be some agreement that personal names, copyrights, etc. are harmful. The opinions here seem to be divided on the usefulness of successfull messages "Driver Foo loaded OK and detected 2 Foo cards at oxF00 and oxBAR". Those messages annoy some, and are very useful for some. So, why not add a boot parameter, a key, or something, to make them visible when needed. When not needed, they could be kept away from confusing the poor users...
The way I read this is that even if I pay for the toolkit, I may not use it if I distribute any GPL'd software.
So, if my shop sells one RedHat CD, I can not use the SDK for developing anything! This gets horribly close to free speach issues, and very close to "reasonable conditions". IANAL, but probably this kind of clause would be laughed out of the court here in Denmark! Someone want to try?
And in 2005 the Martians come to demand compensation when the rover accidentally crashes in their capital and kills two high priests. They demand the unconditional surrender of the following individuals:
Firs post
First post
Hot grits
Kilroy was here
goats.cx
As all of those have been seen frequenting slashdot, they will nuke the slashdot site from the orbit if said persons are not delivered to Mars within a week.