I believe that you are allowed to work for up to one year after your schooling is finished. Your University student services should have more information on that. To be honest, many, many, many friends of mine that came to this country to study had a difficult time staying. To a man/woman everyone that is still here today is married to a US citizen.
Many in the open source community and the hacking community in general b*tch and moan whenever a company releases something with weak/poor encryption. When a company takes the advice of those that scream loudest, they are suddenly boycotted because there product doesn't meet the "ethos" of the hacking community.
I may not agree with what the company is doing, and I may secretly hope that the watermark is cracked after it has been accepted BUT I have to respect the company for trying to test their security in the open. It is a step that more companies need to make.
The "Boycott" makes the Open Source community look like a whining 2 year old throwing a temper tantrum. "Waaaaa, your not doing things my way, Waaaaa, I'm not going to help you now, Waaaaa, you don't really love me,Waaaaa, I'll show YOU!"
Please stop posting stuff like "They are just using our free programing services and ripping us off". If the open source movement is to be successful FOR PROFIT companies have to make it work. This means that people contribute to to a progect, be it testing as is the case here, or actually coding. They also don't usually get paid for those contributions.
If you make the water mark stronger, then it shows that our community is full of good coders. If you boycott the FINAL product, and stick to using MP3's or whatever format YOU prefer then in the end market forces will drive the watermarked music people out of business. The idea is to stop the product from being a success because the idea of watermarked music is flawed. NOT that watermarked music can't be made secure.
This wasn't about copyright, just reverse engineering, which the courts say fell under "fair use". CNET Article
I find this interesting in the States since reverse engineering here is not usually well accepted/protected legally."
I find the last statement odd, reverse engineering is a time honored tradition that goes back a long way. Remember all the early "non-ibm" BIOSes were reverse engineered. The hoops that manufacturers went through to insure the integrity of the reverse engineering were pretty intense. For a long time reverse engineering for the BIOS was done as follows.
team 1 of engineers inspects pokes and generally fiddles with a known BIOS, and then writes a report on what a BIOS should do based on what they discovered the BIOS that they were fooling with did.
team 2 of engineers who have 0 contact with team 1 then use said report to design a new bios without ever seeing the source code or the other bios in action.
I think in most states laws were passed or clarified in Court so that the procedure became greatly streamlined. This allowed a lot of smaller players to get into business and do some reverse engineering WITHOUT needing to pay 2 separate teams of engineers. The problem had been some recent bad legislation that seems to contradict time honored reverse engineering/fair use laws.
The other problem is our patent system. I think this is a small victory, the real challenge lays ahead. That challenge is deciding what can and cannot be patented.
Too bad that it had to drag on for so long before a decision was rendered. If your pockets are deep enough you can sue, even if your wrong. The technological window time wise is so small that any chance your competition had is gone before the litigation is finished.
I was under the impression that I2 was simply a seperate network from the Internet for scientific purposes. This network was being developed because of the "bandwidth/bottleneck" problems that were starting to pop up on "the net"
I2 had nothing to do with distributed computing model as described in this article.
As a top technological employee your don't get overtime, by the way, we need you to come in on Saturday
Ever heard that at your work place? Ever work more than 100 hours in a week? What management expects of some the IT workers was considered slave labor not long ago. People that need or require an escape may find it in drugs, others find it elsewhere (slashdot for example!)
Only when workers and management realize that some projects take time to complete, and more time to do the job correctly will people stop taking uppers to stay awake. (i.e. plan for your staff to sleep atleastonce a week or so)
As far as the richer upper management drug problem, it's simply a repeat of history, the nouveau riche have always had trouble controlling their excesses.
Doh - the other end can't force this - you can either say "use my MAC address to construct my address" or "use something else like this random number or address server..."
Like manufacturers routinely follow the specs to the letter. Here's an example, I'll go slow so you can follow me.
Company X has a neat to VPN box for the SOHO. To make sure that their VPN boxes are only connecting to each other and not to someone that's trying to reverse engineer them, they use the MAC address as well as the IP when connecting. This allows them to have decent planned obsolescence. Change some MAC algorithm and voila, can't use old box with new box and new box's feature set.
This is transparent to the end user, unless you try to VPN to the cube with your Linux/BSD/BeOS box and it refuses to connect. Then you realize that the MAC portion isn't optional. A company throwing stones in the path of the reverse engineer, and trying to lock a customer into their product alone could find some uses for the MAC in IPv6, and would NOT make it optional
This is just one example that I came up with AFTER I read the spec the FIRST time around.
The fear is that the optional feature of ipv6 that incorperates a MAC address is a bit overblown. Remember the MAC address in the IP is optional. They (IP addresses and MACs) are both nothing but "unique identifer numbers. If your really worried about privacy then try the following.
Buy nothing from any vendor that forces your to use the MAC address option.
Buy nothing from any vendor that turns the option on by default.
Buy 4 NICs and switch them once a week, confusing the HELL out those bastards tracking you.
Fight any proposal to change that option to a requirement.
Scan the net a bit and use an open proxy server to surf through (obfuscation attack?)
And of course my favorite; wear a latex suit and wrap your head in aluminum. This totally disgueses your actions on the Internet and makes you totally anonymous.
PS priacy starts at home, is your phone number listed?
Improved NTFS gives Linux a better chance at being accepted into a "mixed" environment.
You can now use a Linux boot disk so that you can hack that NT server they give you an account on.
For the microsoft developer
You now have hundreds of free programers working for you. You don't ever have to worry about that whole "health insurance" issue your other "temp" programmers had.
Trusted systems are neat, but trusted system users shouldn't forget :
1. Most attacks come from within.
2. Most network connected computers are not usually as secure as the server.
3. The users of any "secure" system MUST be taught security. (anti-social engineering, good data integrity practices, etc.)
While many companies and institutions concentrate on building more secure "machines", they spend almost no money on training their employees. Call up the help desk of your favorite fortune 500 company, claim your Mr. X use an on-line company directory to get someones name that is HIGH up. A board member is always good. Bitch about not being able to get your mail, while you may not get a passwd, you WILL get the IP address of the POP3 server, what the mail client is used.
Security can only start after every one is trained to be secure.
My point is that the internet acts as a technological filter/shield. This filter/shield sits between the user and the people they interact with. Where historically people that presented artificial versions of themselves had to convice us through their communication skills, or perhaps there ability to disguise themselves. Today technology insulates us from being able to judge people by direct observation.
Look at our current presidential election. Both sides are spending millions and millions on being able to insulate their canidate while progecting (through TV) a message they think will sell. Thus our campaigns have been reduced to image sales, as opposed to the selling ideas.
So it's not whose idea is the best, it's who sounds better, or who flames better, or who looks better.
The Internet has the potential to change some things because of the free flow of information. The Internet also requires a certain amount of intelligence to use as most communication is currently written. This medium allows people to quickly comment and point out when people's personas aren't "fitting together" which is important because traditional media can be bought or biased. The Internet on the other hand allows many voices to be heard. The problems in the end are
Single to noise ratio
Careing enough to comment, or research people
Careing enought to interact on a personal level because.
It's an interesting premise, and the basics for this have been around for years. The French thought masks were VERY erotic. WHY? Because at the costume ball you didn't really know who you were having sex with. Is our modern day net so different? It makes PERFECT sense that sex and desire go hand in hand with the net, but don't forget the one word that ties it together. ANONYMITY
What is more interesting is the alienation about going on-line. This gets freaky when sociologists start to look at cultures such as Japan where young people are starting to no longer communicate directly with each other. Instead they "interface" through games and alter egos presented in those games.
In the end, isn't it Humanity we want to preserve? Isn't the net just another tool, but not a "be all end all"? The net will really start to loose it's sex appeal when your significant other CAN ONLY talk to you through their new character, ultra femme II.
Sometimes HUMAN interaction without the electronic filters is the sexiest of all.
Seems interesting that the company is going after chip manufacturers with whom it already has liscence agreements. This would indicate to me that rambus is one of the following
Stupid and enjoys goading people it has agreements with
Broke and needs cash and settling out of court over the misuse of a comma in a liscence agreement might get it.
Has lawyers that like to get paid a-lot and they reccomend suits as opposed to face to face discussions.
Sad when it can cost MUCH less to pay off the idiot suing you. It's also sad to see the cost it takes to be able to win in a court. Our legal system is so silly sometimes, remember when an accident was an accident and not a settlement? Neither do I.
The thing that this guy forgets is that many small business that CURRENTLY use MS products would suffer a great deal if they had to pay for everything that the MS liscence says so. How many machines does the Mom and Pop outfit run with one copy of 98 and one copy of NT??
The sad fact is that if the cost of the OS went up you would simply see a lot more illegal copies. This would also have the added benefit of spurring development of software for the open source OSes. People familliar with the open source operating systems would be in more demand and the "Shut up and reboot" technique of tech support would die.
It doesn't help when you have people that can memorise 100 questions, get a certification and suddenly they think they are qualified to make 150k a year. Qualified IT people are rare, idiots that say they are qualified and have no clue are slightly less rare.
When I was in the posistion to hire somone for an IT/IS posistion 1/3 of the applicants LIED on their resume. Of the 15 I hand picked from over 50 resumes, only 3 could accurately tell me the following (notice one is an opinion, some of the canidates didn't know what a scripting language was!!!)
What's a subnet?
Do you know the difference between a routed and un-routed protocol?
What is your favorite scripting language?
Add to that some pretty nasty assumptions that we would be converting our network to an ALL NT network because that was the wave of the future and you have a dismal showing for people that called themselves IT proffesionals.
This "shortage" is also caused by workers that refuse to adapt to changing technologies, and Management that refuses to train old employees that are willing to adapt on new technologies.
And digital tru 64 Unix (or whatever they call it this week) has been able to run Alpha Linux binaries for sometime (years). Nothing new, just added the Big Blue logo, and in the end thats what counts:)
But you forget the process that kernel development goes through. No one person walks in and changes everything. There are many developers working out there on various aspects of the linux kernel and modules. This means that
The IBM code would have to go through the same "due process" as other kernel mods
The kernel would still be a Linux kernel and not IBM kernel becaue many Linux develpers would still be hacking on the code submitted.
There will always be some bugs to be squashed and features to be added that IBM may not have the best solution to.
I think you underestimate developers skill and motivations with your last paragraph.
Remember Linux runs on a LOTS of different hardware (I started running linux on alpha's many years ago) The code the IBM submits is a good ground to start from, but there will be a lot of tweaking left as most linux users aren't running AIX workstations.
I think it's good that Big Blue is wading into the OS waters. I just think that the motivation for many companies stepping up to the Open Source plate isn't as altruistic as they make it sound.
I'd be suspicious when somone in a company says "doesn't want do alienate the community by making it look bad". How would helping make any one look bad? Who is being made to look bad? Has new kernel code that worked well ever pissed anyone off before? The gentleman you talked to may sound sincere, but what he says doesn't add up.
I think somone got their feelings hurt when code was offered and not accepted.
Some Interesting quotes from the article : "Linux is really wonderful. It's probably better than almost any other operating system for those highly dedicated environments" with comments like "AIX would be used for those applications that would need more industrial-strength capabilities, more robust I/O"
This interview underscores the fact that "embracing open source" for most traditional UN*X outfits means that Linux is labeled a low end solution while offering an alternates for High end applications.
It seems that Linux is adding to the profit for these companies because they can sell more low end machines with an OS that more and more people are familliar with. This saves them development time and programers because most of the OS is open source. They also keep their high end UN*X for the Big Iron or special computing problems(like beating a chess champion or folding a protein).
Interesting business plans with the OS community doing a lot of leg work for the higher volume lower priced units. Is this the wedge that many OS companies are looking to drive into Microsoft?
Point 3 and 4 started as 1 point, but got split into two seperate ones. Sorry... but I AM using a Microsoft keyboard s/n x04-58556 which is propery registered to me. Perhaps this is a feature of this keyboard:) (or a function of me trying to multi-task at work)
Remember MSN's goal is to move people off from the POP3 servers to a web based e-mail. This gives MSN more eyes viewing their web pages and also keeps mail stored on MS owned servers. This has 3 advatages for MSN
Increased revenue through web-page adverts (web adverts on your MUA aren't spam are they??)
Decreased load from POP3 servers (don't have to make NT survive another mellissa type virus???)
Causes customers to rely on MSN's servers more. Mail is no longer stored locally, but on the remote server.
This also makes searching said e-mail for patterns, spam or illegal software easier.
If I was a MSN customer I'd be pissed! As a consumer I'm just worried.
Here DSl from Bell South has been fairly reliable, and better than Media One's cable connectivity in north and central florida. The problem is that in a lot of areas DSL isn't an option.
I'm connecting up our satelite this weekend. I'll let you know how it compares to DSL.
I hope there is a lot more implementation of RSA stuff in future releases of both Linux and FreeBSD OSes.
An accepted crypto standard that is in use today that can be FREELY used on a open source OS box makes that OS more palitable to "corporate buyers". Which in the end means more resources for the entire OS community.
p.s.
YMMV but NO.0 release of RedHat has been any good IMHO (4.0,5.0 & 6.0) wait for 7.1 or 7.2
>
Like that "written in his spare time" comment. Almost all "spare time" progects I've seen were written during work hours. Man I wish I had his job, or his boss.
The law of the land is the mother of some great inventions. Some examples :
Germany: The speed limit laws and strict driver training directly affected the type of automobile produced in that country. To this day the Germans have raised personal high-speed transportation to an art form.
USA: Federal law (until recently) allowed any person to monitor ANY radio transmission (except in the commission of a crime). This meant that if you wanted to you could/can monitor aircraft, cell phones (until recently), TV's, HAM radios and various other radio transmissions. There was no ban (until recently) on what type of radio receivers were sold in the US, unlike other countries. This has lead to the US being the leader in spread spectrum and other technologies designed to foil eavesdropping.
What technologies will these new laws spawn?
If the code IS broken quickly then the company will have 3 choices, develop stronger crypto (making crypto a technology and area of study that has more funds pumped into it) Drop the idea because it doesn't make business sense, or ask congress to pass laws to restrict use (which spawns lots of jobs for lawyers). Perhaps the public at large needs to not be asleep on the job and let their elected GOVT official know how they feel on an important issue instead of just ranting in news groups?
Crack the code, Crack it fast- Cracking the code puts the ball firmly back in the big bad companies hands. Make sure your govt rep knows how you feel about CURRENT laws , and pressure on congress is an affective way to get a law repealed. Anyone want to set up a PAC? Lets go buy a few Senators
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that you are allowed to work for up to one year after your schooling is finished. Your University student services should have more information on that. To be honest, many, many, many friends of mine that came to this country to study had a difficult time staying. To a man/woman everyone that is still here today is married to a US citizen.
I may not agree with what the company is doing, and I may secretly hope that the watermark is cracked after it has been accepted BUT I have to respect the company for trying to test their security in the open. It is a step that more companies need to make.
The "Boycott" makes the Open Source community look like a whining 2 year old throwing a temper tantrum. "Waaaaa, your not doing things my way, Waaaaa, I'm not going to help you now, Waaaaa, you don't really love me,Waaaaa, I'll show YOU!"
Please stop posting stuff like "They are just using our free programing services and ripping us off". If the open source movement is to be successful FOR PROFIT companies have to make it work. This means that people contribute to to a progect, be it testing as is the case here, or actually coding. They also don't usually get paid for those contributions.
If you make the water mark stronger, then it shows that our community is full of good coders. If you boycott the FINAL product, and stick to using MP3's or whatever format YOU prefer then in the end market forces will drive the watermarked music people out of business. The idea is to stop the product from being a success because the idea of watermarked music is flawed. NOT that watermarked music can't be made secure.
I find the last statement odd, reverse engineering is a time honored tradition that goes back a long way. Remember all the early "non-ibm" BIOSes were reverse engineered. The hoops that manufacturers went through to insure the integrity of the reverse engineering were pretty intense. For a long time reverse engineering for the BIOS was done as follows.
- team 1 of engineers inspects pokes and generally fiddles with a known BIOS, and then writes a report on what a BIOS should do based on what they discovered the BIOS that they were fooling with did.
- team 2 of engineers who have 0 contact with team 1 then use said report to design a new bios without ever seeing the source code or the other bios in action.
I think in most states laws were passed or clarified in Court so that the procedure became greatly streamlined. This allowed a lot of smaller players to get into business and do some reverse engineering WITHOUT needing to pay 2 separate teams of engineers. The problem had been some recent bad legislation that seems to contradict time honored reverse engineering/fair use laws.The other problem is our patent system. I think this is a small victory, the real challenge lays ahead. That challenge is deciding what can and cannot be patented.
Too bad that it had to drag on for so long before a decision was rendered. If your pockets are deep enough you can sue, even if your wrong. The technological window time wise is so small that any chance your competition had is gone before the litigation is finished.
I wonder what this means for Cue cat?
I2 had nothing to do with distributed computing model as described in this article.
Ever heard that at your work place? Ever work more than 100 hours in a week? What management expects of some the IT workers was considered slave labor not long ago. People that need or require an escape may find it in drugs, others find it elsewhere (slashdot for example!)
Only when workers and management realize that some projects take time to complete, and more time to do the job correctly will people stop taking uppers to stay awake. (i.e. plan for your staff to sleep atleastonce a week or so)
As far as the richer upper management drug problem, it's simply a repeat of history, the nouveau riche have always had trouble controlling their excesses.
Company X has a neat to VPN box for the SOHO. To make sure that their VPN boxes are only connecting to each other and not to someone that's trying to reverse engineer them, they use the MAC address as well as the IP when connecting. This allows them to have decent planned obsolescence. Change some MAC algorithm and voila, can't use old box with new box and new box's feature set.
This is transparent to the end user, unless you try to VPN to the cube with your Linux/BSD/BeOS box and it refuses to connect. Then you realize that the MAC portion isn't optional. A company throwing stones in the path of the reverse engineer, and trying to lock a customer into their product alone could find some uses for the MAC in IPv6, and would NOT make it optional
This is just one example that I came up with AFTER I read the spec the FIRST time around.
- Buy nothing from any vendor that forces your to use the MAC address option.
- Buy nothing from any vendor that turns the option on by default.
- Buy 4 NICs and switch them once a week, confusing the HELL out those bastards tracking you.
- Fight any proposal to change that option to a requirement.
- Scan the net a bit and use an open proxy server to surf through (obfuscation attack?)
And of course my favorite; wear a latex suit and wrap your head in aluminum. This totally disgueses your actions on the Internet and makes you totally anonymous.PS priacy starts at home, is your phone number listed?
For the microsoft developer
- 1. Most attacks come from within.
- 2. Most network connected computers are not usually as secure as the server.
- 3. The users of any "secure" system MUST be taught security. (anti-social engineering, good data integrity practices, etc.)
While many companies and institutions concentrate on building more secure "machines", they spend almost no money on training their employees. Call up the help desk of your favorite fortune 500 company, claim your Mr. X use an on-line company directory to get someones name that is HIGH up. A board member is always good. Bitch about not being able to get your mail, while you may not get a passwd, you WILL get the IP address of the POP3 server, what the mail client is used.Security can only start after every one is trained to be secure.
Look at our current presidential election. Both sides are spending millions and millions on being able to insulate their canidate while progecting (through TV) a message they think will sell. Thus our campaigns have been reduced to image sales, as opposed to the selling ideas.
So it's not whose idea is the best, it's who sounds better, or who flames better, or who looks better.
The Internet has the potential to change some things because of the free flow of information. The Internet also requires a certain amount of intelligence to use as most communication is currently written. This medium allows people to quickly comment and point out when people's personas aren't "fitting together" which is important because traditional media can be bought or biased. The Internet on the other hand allows many voices to be heard. The problems in the end are
What is more interesting is the alienation about going on-line. This gets freaky when sociologists start to look at cultures such as Japan where young people are starting to no longer communicate directly with each other. Instead they "interface" through games and alter egos presented in those games.
In the end, isn't it Humanity we want to preserve? Isn't the net just another tool, but not a "be all end all"? The net will really start to loose it's sex appeal when your significant other CAN ONLY talk to you through their new character, ultra femme II.
Sometimes HUMAN interaction without the electronic filters is the sexiest of all.
Sad when it can cost MUCH less to pay off the idiot suing you. It's also sad to see the cost it takes to be able to win in a court. Our legal system is so silly sometimes, remember when an accident was an accident and not a settlement? Neither do I.
The sad fact is that if the cost of the OS went up you would simply see a lot more illegal copies. This would also have the added benefit of spurring development of software for the open source OSes. People familliar with the open source operating systems would be in more demand and the "Shut up and reboot" technique of tech support would die.
Bring on the 1000 dollar windows :)
When I was in the posistion to hire somone for an IT/IS posistion 1/3 of the applicants LIED on their resume. Of the 15 I hand picked from over 50 resumes, only 3 could accurately tell me the following (notice one is an opinion, some of the canidates didn't know what a scripting language was!!!)
Add to that some pretty nasty assumptions that we would be converting our network to an ALL NT network because that was the wave of the future and you have a dismal showing for people that called themselves IT proffesionals.
This "shortage" is also caused by workers that refuse to adapt to changing technologies, and Management that refuses to train old employees that are willing to adapt on new technologies.
And digital tru 64 Unix (or whatever they call it this week) has been able to run Alpha Linux binaries for sometime (years). Nothing new, just added the Big Blue logo, and in the end thats what counts :)
I think you underestimate developers skill and motivations with your last paragraph.
Remember Linux runs on a LOTS of different hardware (I started running linux on alpha's many years ago) The code the IBM submits is a good ground to start from, but there will be a lot of tweaking left as most linux users aren't running AIX workstations.
I think it's good that Big Blue is wading into the OS waters. I just think that the motivation for many companies stepping up to the Open Source plate isn't as altruistic as they make it sound.
I can just see it now. The old sit on the copier, or bare your chest over the Xerox machine is going to add a whole new dimension to office pranks!
I think somone got their feelings hurt when code was offered and not accepted.
This interview underscores the fact that "embracing open source" for most traditional UN*X outfits means that Linux is labeled a low end solution while offering an alternates for High end applications.
It seems that Linux is adding to the profit for these companies because they can sell more low end machines with an OS that more and more people are familliar with. This saves them development time and programers because most of the OS is open source. They also keep their high end UN*X for the Big Iron or special computing problems(like beating a chess champion or folding a protein).
Interesting business plans with the OS community doing a lot of leg work for the higher volume lower priced units. Is this the wedge that many OS companies are looking to drive into Microsoft?
Point 3 and 4 started as 1 point, but got split into two seperate ones. Sorry... but I AM using a Microsoft keyboard s/n x04-58556 which is propery registered to me. Perhaps this is a feature of this keyboard :) (or a function of me trying to multi-task at work)
If I was a MSN customer I'd be pissed! As a consumer I'm just worried.
I'm connecting up our satelite this weekend. I'll let you know how it compares to DSL.
An accepted crypto standard that is in use today that can be FREELY used on a open source OS box makes that OS more palitable to "corporate buyers". Which in the end means more resources for the entire OS community.
p.s. YMMV but NO .0 release of RedHat has been any good IMHO (4.0,5.0 & 6.0) wait for 7.1 or 7.2
>
Like that "written in his spare time" comment. Almost all "spare time" progects I've seen were written during work hours. Man I wish I had his job, or his boss.
Germany: The speed limit laws and strict driver training directly affected the type of automobile produced in that country. To this day the Germans have raised personal high-speed transportation to an art form.
USA: Federal law (until recently) allowed any person to monitor ANY radio transmission (except in the commission of a crime). This meant that if you wanted to you could/can monitor aircraft, cell phones (until recently), TV's, HAM radios and various other radio transmissions. There was no ban (until recently) on what type of radio receivers were sold in the US, unlike other countries. This has lead to the US being the leader in spread spectrum and other technologies designed to foil eavesdropping.
What technologies will these new laws spawn?
If the code IS broken quickly then the company will have 3 choices, develop stronger crypto (making crypto a technology and area of study that has more funds pumped into it) Drop the idea because it doesn't make business sense, or ask congress to pass laws to restrict use (which spawns lots of jobs for lawyers). Perhaps the public at large needs to not be asleep on the job and let their elected GOVT official know how they feel on an important issue instead of just ranting in news groups?
Crack the code, Crack it fast- Cracking the code puts the ball firmly back in the big bad companies hands. Make sure your govt rep knows how you feel about CURRENT laws , and pressure on congress is an affective way to get a law repealed. Anyone want to set up a PAC? Lets go buy a few Senators