Wouldn't it be just as easy to phish if the page could look like anything as if the page always looked the same?
No. When the login page looks different for different people, the likelihood of any given phishing attack succeeding becomes much smaller whenever the attacker guesses wrong about how a user's login page is supposed to look like. Mass-phishing attacks therefore become much more difficult to execute because the attacker would need a way to not only contact a large number of people with a message containing a link, but in addition the attacker would need to determine for all these potential victims what their login pages are supposed to look like.
However, it is logically correct to call Free Software a subset of Open Source Software.
Well, if you start with the assumption that the set of Free Software is identical to the set of Open Source Software (which is approximately true), you can derive as a logical conclusion that it is a subset, yes. However, making that statement is very misleading, as it gives the impression of Free Software somehow being a special case of Open Source Software.
Initially and for seveal years (I don't know exactly when they changed that), the Open Source Initiative described itself as "a marketing program for free software" and as a "pitch for 'free software' on solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological tub-thumping". These quotes are from their "Frequently Asked Questions about Open Source" document which used to be available quite prominently on their website. You can still find a copy here.
The punishments for such infractions are obviously not high enough.
Yes.. if fact maybe the main problem is a lack of conherence and predictability in antitrust presecution and antitrust judgements. See the paper "The Incoherence of Punishment in Antitrust" by S. W. Waller, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Vol. 78, p. 207, 2003.
It is more likely they looked at previous (MS) antitrust settlements and decided that an anti-competitive strategy was an attractive move for execs and shareholders alike.
This is my list of 5 most important open source software figures in the world.... Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman doesn't agree with being called an "open source software figure" or with being considered part of the "open source movement". The "open source" movement is a fork of the "free software" movement started by Richard Stallman. Although "open source software" is practically identical to "free software" for just about all practical purposes, the fundamental philosophy of the Open Source Initiative differs significantly enough from the viewpoint of Stallman's Free Software Foundation (FSF) that the FSF will, if participating at all at "open source" events, put up a big "we're not part of the open source movement!" banner. A good discussion of the difference between "open source" and "free software" from the FSF's perspective is here.
Anyone who cares already knows. Anyone who wants to find out, can find out.
I'm not interested in learning the history of everything -- I'm just interested in learning the history of events that can teach me significant lessons, e.g. by inspiring me (starting humble can work out really well if there is significant demand and an empowering license like the GPL is used) or by warning of dangers.
Therefore, articles like this are important to me. I wouldn't know to look for this particular bit of history if it weren't for people pointing out that this is a worthwhile bit of history to read up on.
(In this particular instance, I knew already, but only because I came across an article on the same topic some time ago. Nevertheless I'm appreciating the reminder.)
what does 'bay' and 'e' have to do with 'auctions'
Well, 'e' is about doing something electronically that was previously done differently, and 'bay' is similar enough to 'buy' to make an unconscious connection in the mind, but different enough to avoid the conclusion of 'ebay' being (from the perspective of the general public) only about buying. And all that in only four letters. A really great name choice. And on top of that, if you have the kind of business plan and funding that you can hope to gain market dominance for some category of product or service, you don't need a name that becomes memorable through similarity to a well-known word. Whatever strategy you have for gaining the kind of market share that you're aiming for, will be enough to also make your name memorable.
Things are different for the countless little gnats of the information technology ecosystem, of course. Wouldn't one of them have grabbed Windux.com by now if that really was such a great, customer-confidence inspiring name?
I think that "Lindows" was a much better choice than "Windux" would have been, precisely because "Lindows" is not only memorable but also confidence-inspiring.
Windux, on the other hand, is a perfect way of saying we've cleaned up the bugs on the Windows with Windex, and if you want, sue us and we'll clean your real glass windows on the Microsoft campus for you instead of going to jail for infringement.
I'm not aware of any successful examples where putting this kind of humor (which is based onto a perspective twist) into a product name or company name has really helped brand development. Branding is about burning a name and a corresponding association indelibly into the minds of your current and potential customers. This is totally at odds with humor which derives its funniness from a perspective twist (physical windows that need to be cleaned vs computers that need to be cleaned from malware), which can only hinder your efforts of burning some idea forcefully into someone's mind.
In the eyes of the 'nix community they are tainted by this agreement and they will probably avoid on principal, so they must be banking that the new features (ttf, WMP10, DRM) are enough to tempt in people who do not know better.
In the eyes of people with strict free software principles they were tainted well before making this deal.
They've now offenended a somewhat larger segment of the community, but they're counting on the community's inability to effectively communicate just how far they have lowered themselves to whatever target group they've chosed for their commercial products.
As a matter of fact it's not necessary to wait for a public comment from ESR to know his views. If anything, these events can only reinforce his views that he wants "to see Microsoft broken on the wheel not by government fiat but by enlightened consumer choice". (Source: Halloween Documents FAQ
Isn't he on the linspire board or something?
According to this post apparantly by Linspire's CEO Eric is (or at least still was on Feb 23, 2007) "one of many un-paid volunteers of the Freespire Leadership Board". I wouldn't be surprised if Eric reconsiders his involvement in that project in reaction to Linspire's agreement with Microsoft, but it's his choice of course.
I think they should have called Lindows a better name.. Windux.
What makes you think that this would be a better name?
In support of my view that Windux is not a particularly attractive name, I point to the website at www.Windux.com which looks like the domain would be for sale if someone made an attractive offer to the current holder. Nowadays just about all domain names which are really good because they combione a reference to a well-known industry term with shortness, memorability and a pleasant overall impression are being put to some kind of commercial use already.
Association with porn harms development goals
on
OLPC Used to Browse Porn
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem is that this gets in the way of the project's ability to achieve its real goals:
In every society there are people there are people with stricter-than-average standards of morality with regard to matters of sexuality and there are people with less strict standards. Here, with "standards of morality" I mean the pricinples according to which the people actually conduct their lives, I'm not talking about moral rules that people claim to uphold without actually living accordingly.
It can not be denied that for long-term economic development the key group of people to reach are those which who have sufficiently high standards of morality that they are able to have stable families in which the children are supported and empowered so that there is a good chance of them making significant positive contributions to the future of their community, region and/or country.
In every society, there is segmentation: Parents who work hard on empowering their children to be really successful will generally desire for their children to associate with the children of other parents who do the same. This is easy to understand economically. After all, in every society, knowing the right people is a key success factor.
Now what you absolutely don't want to happen in a project with development goals is for the key segments of society (with the people whom you really need to reach) to become unenthusiastic about the project because it gets associated with blatant porn in ways which are considered totally unacceptable in those segments of society.
The way to answer FUD is to provide specific information debunking the FUD's vague claims. This applies equally to those who want to answer FUD criticism of GPLv3 and to those who want to answer this article which in fact is FUD about criticism of GPLv3.
This does not change the fact that it is wrong to provide a forum to FUDsters.
Actually, while it is true that mass disregard for copyright could conceivably have a potential long-term effect of weakening copyright (at least with regard to non-commercial copying), that also undermines the legitimate functions of copyright, and will in addition fail to have any positive effects whatsoever with regard to copyfraud.
What we need to do is to set up a global reputation system of publishers and other businesses where copyfrausters and those who deceive or defraud the public in other ways get their reputations trashed by means of publication of detailed proof of what they did and/or do wrong, while more honest competitors get positive reputation points for their honesty.
Of course, one reason why Dell can offer GNU/Linux boxes more cheaply is that if Dell manages to sell them in significant quantity, they can avoid paying MS for licenses, therefore, in the large quantities case, they will be able to make the profit they want at a lower retail price point. But right now, I'm pretty sure that what they're going for with this pricing strategy is primarily the kind of community support that they need to generate in order to reach significant quantities on their GNU/Linux based offerings in the first place. I and many other people in the community would feel bad about an offer from Dell that would give the impression of still paying the equivalent of the Microsoft tax, with only the difference of the money now staying at Dell and not going to Microsoft.
I don't know the exact text of the agreement but I am bit worried about the contributions from the distros that have signed the deal.
Novell etc are hurting their human-to-human relationships with the community and (to the extent that the deals they do violate GPLv2 and GPLv3) they hurt their ability to continue to legally distribute GNU/Linux, but the contributions they've made are irrevocably made under whatever license they distributed their contributions under - these contributions don't become invalid if they violate the license on parts of GNU/Linux that were contributed by others.
How would the community have coped with two of the largest vendors doing so?
The community would have survived, but much time would have been wasted on dealing with FUD and other unproductive arguments. As long as none of the leading business-supported distributions (currently Redhat and Unbuntu) is affected, the damage is much more limited.
What Microsoft did was an obvious and blatant violation of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association ethics code. The bloggers should have publicly criticized these Microsoft tactics instead of going along with them.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
Do you have any suggestions for how to get going with respect to the second part of this?
No. When the login page looks different for different people, the likelihood of any given phishing attack succeeding becomes much smaller whenever the attacker guesses wrong about how a user's login page is supposed to look like. Mass-phishing attacks therefore become much more difficult to execute because the attacker would need a way to not only contact a large number of people with a message containing a link, but in addition the attacker would need to determine for all these potential victims what their login pages are supposed to look like.
Well, if you start with the assumption that the set of Free Software is identical to the set of Open Source Software (which is approximately true), you can derive as a logical conclusion that it is a subset, yes. However, making that statement is very misleading, as it gives the impression of Free Software somehow being a special case of Open Source Software.
Initially and for seveal years (I don't know exactly when they changed that), the Open Source Initiative described itself as "a marketing program for free software" and as a "pitch for 'free software' on solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological tub-thumping". These quotes are from their "Frequently Asked Questions about Open Source" document which used to be available quite prominently on their website. You can still find a copy here.
Yes.. if fact maybe the main problem is a lack of conherence and predictability in antitrust presecution and antitrust judgements. See the paper "The Incoherence of Punishment in Antitrust" by S. W. Waller, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Vol. 78, p. 207, 2003.
It is more likely they looked at previous (MS) antitrust settlements and decided that an anti-competitive strategy was an attractive move for execs and shareholders alike.
Yes :-(
Richard Stallman doesn't agree with being called an "open source software figure" or with being considered part of the "open source movement". The "open source" movement is a fork of the "free software" movement started by Richard Stallman. Although "open source software" is practically identical to "free software" for just about all practical purposes, the fundamental philosophy of the Open Source Initiative differs significantly enough from the viewpoint of Stallman's Free Software Foundation (FSF) that the FSF will, if participating at all at "open source" events, put up a big "we're not part of the open source movement!" banner. A good discussion of the difference between "open source" and "free software" from the FSF's perspective is here.
I'm not interested in learning the history of everything -- I'm just interested in learning the history of events that can teach me significant lessons, e.g. by inspiring me (starting humble can work out really well if there is significant demand and an empowering license like the GPL is used) or by warning of dangers.
Therefore, articles like this are important to me. I wouldn't know to look for this particular bit of history if it weren't for people pointing out that this is a worthwhile bit of history to read up on.
(In this particular instance, I knew already, but only because I came across an article on the same topic some time ago. Nevertheless I'm appreciating the reminder.)
Well, 'e' is about doing something electronically that was previously done differently, and 'bay' is similar enough to 'buy' to make an unconscious connection in the mind, but different enough to avoid the conclusion of 'ebay' being (from the perspective of the general public) only about buying. And all that in only four letters. A really great name choice. And on top of that, if you have the kind of business plan and funding that you can hope to gain market dominance for some category of product or service, you don't need a name that becomes memorable through similarity to a well-known word. Whatever strategy you have for gaining the kind of market share that you're aiming for, will be enough to also make your name memorable.
Things are different for the countless little gnats of the information technology ecosystem, of course. Wouldn't one of them have grabbed Windux.com by now if that really was such a great, customer-confidence inspiring name?
I think that "Lindows" was a much better choice than "Windux" would have been, precisely because "Lindows" is not only memorable but also confidence-inspiring.
Windux, on the other hand, is a perfect way of saying we've cleaned up the bugs on the Windows with Windex, and if you want, sue us and we'll clean your real glass windows on the Microsoft campus for you instead of going to jail for infringement.
I'm not aware of any successful examples where putting this kind of humor (which is based onto a perspective twist) into a product name or company name has really helped brand development. Branding is about burning a name and a corresponding association indelibly into the minds of your current and potential customers. This is totally at odds with humor which derives its funniness from a perspective twist (physical windows that need to be cleaned vs computers that need to be cleaned from malware), which can only hinder your efforts of burning some idea forcefully into someone's mind.
In the eyes of people with strict free software principles they were tainted well before making this deal.
They've now offenended a somewhat larger segment of the community, but they're counting on the community's inability to effectively communicate just how far they have lowered themselves to whatever target group they've chosed for their commercial products.
As a matter of fact it's not necessary to wait for a public comment from ESR to know his views. If anything, these events can only reinforce his views that he wants "to see Microsoft broken on the wheel not by government fiat but by enlightened consumer choice". (Source: Halloween Documents FAQ
Isn't he on the linspire board or something?
According to this post apparantly by Linspire's CEO Eric is (or at least still was on Feb 23, 2007) "one of many un-paid volunteers of the Freespire Leadership Board". I wouldn't be surprised if Eric reconsiders his involvement in that project in reaction to Linspire's agreement with Microsoft, but it's his choice of course.
What makes you think that this would be a better name?
In support of my view that Windux is not a particularly attractive name, I point to the website at www.Windux.com which looks like the domain would be for sale if someone made an attractive offer to the current holder. Nowadays just about all domain names which are really good because they combione a reference to a well-known industry term with shortness, memorability and a pleasant overall impression are being put to some kind of commercial use already.
The problem is that this gets in the way of the project's ability to achieve its real goals:
In every society there are people there are people with stricter-than-average standards of morality with regard to matters of sexuality and there are people with less strict standards. Here, with "standards of morality" I mean the pricinples according to which the people actually conduct their lives, I'm not talking about moral rules that people claim to uphold without actually living accordingly.
It can not be denied that for long-term economic development the key group of people to reach are those which who have sufficiently high standards of morality that they are able to have stable families in which the children are supported and empowered so that there is a good chance of them making significant positive contributions to the future of their community, region and/or country.
In every society, there is segmentation: Parents who work hard on empowering their children to be really successful will generally desire for their children to associate with the children of other parents who do the same. This is easy to understand economically. After all, in every society, knowing the right people is a key success factor.
Now what you absolutely don't want to happen in a project with development goals is for the key segments of society (with the people whom you really need to reach) to become unenthusiastic about the project because it gets associated with blatant porn in ways which are considered totally unacceptable in those segments of society.
The way to answer FUD is to provide specific information debunking the FUD's vague claims. This applies equally to those who want to answer FUD criticism of GPLv3 and to those who want to answer this article which in fact is FUD about criticism of GPLv3.
This does not change the fact that it is wrong to provide a forum to FUDsters.
Actually, while it is true that mass disregard for copyright could conceivably have a potential long-term effect of weakening copyright (at least with regard to non-commercial copying), that also undermines the legitimate functions of copyright, and will in addition fail to have any positive effects whatsoever with regard to copyfraud.
What we need to do is to set up a global reputation system of publishers and other businesses where copyfrausters and those who deceive or defraud the public in other ways get their reputations trashed by means of publication of detailed proof of what they did and/or do wrong, while more honest competitors get positive reputation points for their honesty.
Of course, one reason why Dell can offer GNU/Linux boxes more cheaply is that if Dell manages to sell them in significant quantity, they can avoid paying MS for licenses, therefore, in the large quantities case, they will be able to make the profit they want at a lower retail price point. But right now, I'm pretty sure that what they're going for with this pricing strategy is primarily the kind of community support that they need to generate in order to reach significant quantities on their GNU/Linux based offerings in the first place. I and many other people in the community would feel bad about an offer from Dell that would give the impression of still paying the equivalent of the Microsoft tax, with only the difference of the money now staying at Dell and not going to Microsoft.
Novell etc are hurting their human-to-human relationships with the community and (to the extent that the deals they do violate GPLv2 and GPLv3) they hurt their ability to continue to legally distribute GNU/Linux, but the contributions they've made are irrevocably made under whatever license they distributed their contributions under - these contributions don't become invalid if they violate the license on parts of GNU/Linux that were contributed by others.
The community would have survived, but much time would have been wasted on dealing with FUD and other unproductive arguments. As long as none of the leading business-supported distributions (currently Redhat and Unbuntu) is affected, the damage is much more limited.
Therefore, it's important to react now, as long as it's essentially just Novell, and support the GPL version upgrade from version 2 to version 3.
What Microsoft did was an obvious and blatant violation of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association ethics code. The bloggers should have publicly criticized these Microsoft tactics instead of going along with them.