On my linux firewall guarding a company network I was seeing way over 1 million ping packets per minute at one point! I'd call that a DDoS attack! From the inside out.
For those with Linux firewalls, try the following iptables rules to rate limit those ping packets:
New Oxford American Dictionary
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The 'recognised' standard for American English is Websters
As a US citizen, I for one don't recognize(-se) Webster's as my standard...I much prefer the New Oxford American Dictionary, (2001). Webster's just seems a little to casual and not as rigorously researched and edited. Besides, the N.O.A.D. is from the same organization as the Oxford English Dictionary, the British standard, so it is IMHO in the best position to illustrate the American vs. British language variants.
Which, BTW, the New Oxford American Dictionary specifies flavor only, with a parenthetical note that the British spelling happens to be flavour. But in American English, flavour is not an acceptable spelling.
On a side note, the web community seems to need help with their spelling too. Consider:
"speling". From Apache, the module which auto-corrects typos in URLs.
"referer". From the HTTP protocol, this misspelling was unfortunately never caught until it was too late to change...so a footnote was placed in the RFC explaining it.
Re:It would make for a great cinema effect
on
Walk-thru Fog Screen
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
In the real world, fog screens tend to make terrible pileups on the highways where the crashes aren't so pretend.
As far as amusement parks, good luck trying to keep a laminar airflow while a high velocity vehicle whizes by. And forget outdoors, the breeze would carry your image away, that's if you could even see it in the sunlight. Probably more useful in a haunted house ride...life-like ghosts, and cool the airflow and you also get the chill down the back of your neck too.
No, I feel there is still some distinction. An mp3 file (or the unencumbered ogg-vorbis) is not strictly just an idea, it does have some tangible existence and some utility.
In general (and this is way overly simplified), patents deal with ideas, while copyrights deal with tangible products. Although the lines are very blurry, and there usually is some idea behind every product. This is the main reason why I find patents so much more offensive than copyrights (although both are frequently abused).
I still strongly agree that copying a file is not stealing as it doesn't meet my previous three conditions. It is simply copying. And if you don't have permissions to make the copy (whether implicitly by law such as fair use or directly from the copyright holder), then your copying is more specifically unauthorized copying.
But the word stealing has no place in either type of infringement. Also whether you call it stealing or something else has nothing to do with whether it is legal or moral.
...to a Virginia inventor (former CIA engineer) who accused the company of stealing his ideas.
Why do people always use the wrong words? You can not steal an idea, except perhaps in some far-out science fiction where neuron transplants occur (Spock's brain?).
Now you can copy my idea, you can be inspired by my ideas, you can derive the same idea I had by examining some tangible expression of the idea (e.g., product reverse engineering), or you can have the same idea as me all on your own. The later is actualy the most likely reason why two individuals have the same idea, they just had the same thoughts. Thoughts are not mutually exclusive.
Now, you can steal blueprints, computer printouts, prototypes, webservers, money, or even customers; practically anything that's tangible and where ownership is by nature mutually exclusive. But you can not steal ideas.
If I actually could steal your idea, then three things must be true:
You no longer posses the idea you once had as a direct result of my actions,
I obtained the idea directly from you--I did not come up with it on my own,
You did not not give me permission to do the above two things.
Short of that, it's simply not stealing. So the headline should have more correctly read:
...who accused the company of using the same ideas that he had.
Ooops, *blush*, I computed wrong. Okay, the
correct number is 20.09 bits.
There are 1112063 possible codepoints (0x10ffff - 2048). Taking the log-base-2 you get approximately 20.09. Still WAY less that 21-bits, which was my main point, but yes it is slightly more than 20-bits too. So I stand corrected. (Of course if you don't count surrogates which are not real characters....)
Umm, not to nitpick too much since your point is entirely correct.
But it's really 20-bit, not 21-bit. The maximum codepoint is U+10FFFF. But since 0 is not a valid codepoint, there's really only 20-bits worth of information there, not 21 (actually its more like 19.8 bits since some codepoints are permamently unassigned). Remember, UCS codepoints are abstract numbers, not specific bit patterns; so you have to measure information content, not the number of bits it takes if you just happen to choose a particular binary representation like two's-complement.
But I do have to strongly agree that so many people seem confused and always think Unicode is 16-bits, which is just plain wrong! And most people who use UTF-16 sadly don't even know anything about surrogate pairs...they think they're using a fixed-width encoding, but UTF-16 is in fact a variable-width encoding just like UTF-8!
Re:This is the reason Unicode is so screwed up
on
Writing with Elvish Fonts
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"Feature creep?" You mean like fiction writers inventing new alphabets and languages like Elvish? It's Unicode that's trying to bring some uniformity and saneness to this human condition of Babel.
Your problem is that you're confusing the Universal Character Set (UCS), which is the core of Unicode, with a character encoding, such as UTF-xx and so forth. UTF-16 is NOT Unicode! When will that myth ever die? Perhaps you should go visit the Unicode Consortium home page and read through some of their FAQs.
And there's way more than just three encodings, but there's only one Unicode (actually there's ISO If these Elvish characters are more than just a curious fad then what's wrong with assigning them Unicode code points? The only problem would be doing so prematurely before all the characters have been reasonably deteremined and stable. Giving them codepoints allows font designers and other software applications to unambiguously exchange Elvish text. Granted though, the Unicode Consortium is primarily concerned with real human languages rather than inventions of fiction.
As far as encodings, keep in mind that Unicode is essentially a 20-bit character set allowing slightly more than one million separate characters to be defined (I say 20-bits loosely since the UCS codepoints really don't map to bits at all). So even your beloved UTF-16 (or the older UCS-2) is unnecessarily messy; having to use the low and high surrogate pairs to properly encode the entire UCS repertoire. Not to mention things like byte order issues and so forth.
This is why I actually love UTF-8, it is actually very simple and easy to work with. I think a lot of people get scared-off because it is variable-width, but for anybody who has actually coded using it, it is a very nice and easy to use encoding. Of course people primarily communicating in non-Latin languages may have other opinions. That's fine too.
As far as Project Gutenberg selecting US-ASCII, well, it sure looks identical to UTF-8 to me! In fact ASCII text is identical to UTF-8 text (but not the other way around). Now when they start archiving lots of non-English public domain texts, well, they may start rethinking the ASCII limitations and I'd be very surprised if UTF-8 is not the adopted character encoding. In fact they could just make the policy change right now, and they'd have to retype exactly zero documents in their collection.
My blessed magic marker keeps drying out when I try to write those complex spellbooks that I can never seem to read. Not to mention all those monsters that keep ignoring my hastily engraved Elbereth; here I've been using the wrong font all along. Stupid tourist!
It's a good thing this guy didn't break any
patents on roller coasters. Although to be fair, most of those have expired, and patents on actual physical machines are palatable.
Oh, does this remind anybody else of the
Cartmanland episode of South Park where Cartman owns his own theme park?
"What we've filed a patent for is the whole method of combining.zip and strong encryption to create a secure.zip file," said Steve Crawford, the chief marketing officer at PKWare.
Who would patent just half the method?
I sure hope he didn't mean they're trying to patent the entire concept of encrypting zip files regardless of the algorithm or method. Because I've been encrypting zip files (among many other types) for a decade.
What's an extension? I use Content-Types like application/x-patented-zip and name all my Zip(TM) files "archive.this.is.not.tar", and when I am forced to use Windows I never see an "extension".
Seriously, the true value of their intellectual "property" (sic) is that of their trademarked brand name. As an archive format it is pretty uninteresting. Everybody knows what "zip" means. Adding a patent in this area to me seems like a dumb move; another one of those all-to-common desparation moves by a failing company to have the USPTO save it. In the late 1990s companies looked for VC firms to save them from their own shortcomings, today the trendy savior seems to be the USPTO.
To me this move just screams "Use our patented technology to secure your important files....BTW you must use only our software and we can revoke your rights to use our patent at any time rendering your important files so secure that not even you can read them legally again!" That's enough to keep me from using their format; it's my data and I don't want my access to it to be contingent upon some party outside of my control.
I think you're confused here. I'm talking about information, not cars. And we're talking about the government, not some corporation or your parents. The government has a social responsibility to insure that the information it produces for its citizens is completely free and open for consumption. Ever notice that the Constitution is not copyrighted?
If Microsoft wants to enhance Word so it can produce output in some non-binary 100% open format, then I have no real objection. Heck, MS could even charge a lot more for this extra feature. There's nothing keeping commercial vendors from supplying tools. But the documents that the government produces with those tools had better not require that it's citizens have to enter into EULA's with Microsoft, nor should it require that I obtain patent licenses in order to read it. Nor should I have to trust only one company that it's product is not distorting or altering the documents that I view, or secretly tracking all people who happen to read the DMCA legislation.
If cost is your sole concern here, then why not just recommend that the Government write all their laws and regulations as DRM-enhanced encrypted eBooks. Then they could sell them to citizens for income. If you want to obey the law, you have to pay to read the law. See how much nonsense that is.
So the real power that OSS has is that by its very nature it makes the "open" requirement of the government very easy to achieve. But if a corporation wants to produce a proprietary and expensive application that may work better than an OSS counterpart, then all the better. But it can not in any way subvert the genuine openness of the government to its citizens by their use of the product.
You're on the right track. It seems that everybody is missing the most important point, that of the "open" in open source software, which is the most important thing for Government use. Although cost should be an issue, it is not nearly as important as openness. The government is around to serve the people, and must make it's "output" must remain free, as in freedom, to all.
The government's "outputs" are of course things like laws and regulations, research, census statistics, environment and geological surveys, budgets, and so on. All of those things should be made available to the public who pay for it without restrictions. And that means that all the document formats used should not be beholden to copyright and patent ridden proprietary corporate software.
Just consider the National Archives, which publishes the Federal Register (the offical US publication which announces regulations and so forth. They have long understood that freedom concept and make all these regulations available as PDF and text, as well as their traditional paper-printed forms. There are no MS Word documents there, no encrypted eBooks. It is important that the public have free access to those publications, and that they remain perfectly readable 20 years from now (long after old Word versions become unreadable by the newer versions). Also it is important that the public be able to trust that what they are reading is authentic. Can I really trust Word to not recognize that when I'm reading a regulation on software piracy it silently inserts an extra little Microsoft sentence? Well, actually MS is not that evil, but the point is that I have no way to really know, the Word format is binary and proprietary and I can't verify that Word is displaying the correct output as I can't examine it's source or recompile it from source.
Governments should adopt OSS not for it's potential price benifits, but philosophically because it is open.
ha ha. Yes, but the premise was different. In the movie you were basically guilty just for thinking (having the intent). In the real US (as I should have clarified), you need to have both the intent and have performed some action which progresses toward that intent, i.e., you bought a smartcard reader. This is BTW why many of the Ten Commandments are also codified in US Law (such as murder), but not all of them (such as coveting). We humans just can't fairly enforce law based only on intent or thought only. But guess what? Law suits designed for intimidation and settlement can be based soley on intent, and yes, they are often unfair.
Since showing intent is obviously a highly subjective and murky decision (without Tome Cruise's special mind-reading future-telling technology), the establishment of guilt is very much in a perpetual gray area and very expensive to argue before a court. That's why DirecTV doesn't really want these suits to go to trial, and also who almost everybody will settle, the guilty and innocent alike.
Clearly these suits are not designed to go to court; they are designed to get people to turn themselves in and get these devices off the street. US$3500 is too cheap for anybody who really is guilty by intent to take it to court. And the "guilty" probably are the majority of the people who bought from those sites.
Of course the problem is those who are innocent. Courts have shown in the past that if you buy a device like this with the intent to perform a crime, then you are guilty even if you didn't carry through on that crime. And as the sites advertised as such, showing that was your intent is much easier.
However there are very legitimate uses for these devices, just as the article shows, and innocent people will get caught up in this. Just because the site may advertise this device as being useful for cracking DirecTV, I may very well buy it for other purposes if the price was cheap. Think about someone selling hardened-steel axes for $5.00 with the advert "You can chop down your neighbor's door with this!"...but at $5.00 I would probably buy one to cut my firewood. If it's not inherently an illegal device (which smartcard programmers are not) and my intended use was not illegal then I did nothing wrong. My intented use doesn't have to match that of the advertiser.
Until this point I've actually respected DirecTV's anti-piracy approach; mainly by counter-hacking and outsmarting the illegal crackers. But now they are going to snare a lot of innocent folks in an expensive legal trap, and setting a bad example for other corporations to try. The innocent should be able to beat this without too much effort, but it will sadly cost them a lot of money and time to prove their innocence.
We are currently pursuing a spammer from the West Palm Beach, Florida area. This wouldn't normally be news,...
Pursuit of fleeing vehicles is much more common in LA, but the West Palm Beach folks are very fond of pursuing rental trucks full of votes to be recounted. So now they are just chasing a truck load of canned pork, doesn't really surprise me much.
I used to think there was a choice too, when I was younger. I've since learned that no matter how screwed up you thing the corporate world and the PHB's are, it's much worse than that. I've got stories that make yours seem like a decision between chocolate and strawberry ice cream. They should start teaching this stuff in college rather than engineering idealism! There's no way you can ever win; just retire and work on Open Source where you can do things the way you want to. I so envy Linus' I'll release when it's done position.
You can get the same effect without a computer. Just hold the end of a phone line with one hand and anything metal and gounded with the other and have somebdy call you. If anything this is a defect with the phone system, not the freaking computer!
This is because the phone company sends a 60-volt (if I remember correctly) pulse down the line to cause a ring...a leftover from the days when it they had to send enough energy to drive the electomechanical bell.
No, what you really need to do is to trick spammers into sending snippets of music along with their messages rather than porn.
Then we just unleash the RIAA on them and the spammers will be sued for $18,000,000,000,000.39 and all their machines will be hacked into and rendered inoperable. After all we all know that spammy pirates (not the pork-eating swashbuckling variety) are way more dangerous to the world than any sort of hate-filled terrorist or unethical bulk advertiser (that's what the **AA tells Congress anyway).
Perhaps Adobe should work with Lexmark to help them out with the crypto coding; you know, that great company that protects the consumer against accidentally using cheap ink with strong cryptographic chips. Then Adobe could not only provide a PDF option to prevent you from printing a document, they could also enforce that if printed, a PDF document will only be printed with 100%-genuine Lexmark toner. Oh, I see another option with Kodak here, perhaps by embedding RFID tags directly in that specical Kodak paper.
BTW, did anyone notice that with the latest PDF specification, version 1.5, which corresponds to Acrobat 6, that they added verbage to the copyright/license part to enforce that all software which implements the PDF specification must obey all those stupid magic security bits? They claim the specification is open and free for anybody to develop software around it, but that since the "format" is copyrighted all independently developed software must obey their fragile DRM schemes. How in the world can they copyright a format; sure their specification is copyrighted being a printed work, but the "format"?
Slashdot Mirror
On my linux firewall guarding a company network I was seeing way over 1 million ping packets per minute at one point! I'd call that a DDoS attack! From the inside out.
For those with Linux firewalls, try the following iptables rules to rate limit those ping packets:
As a US citizen, I for one don't recognize(-se) Webster's as my standard...I much prefer the New Oxford American Dictionary, (2001). Webster's just seems a little to casual and not as rigorously researched and edited. Besides, the N.O.A.D. is from the same organization as the Oxford English Dictionary, the British standard, so it is IMHO in the best position to illustrate the American vs. British language variants.
Which, BTW, the New Oxford American Dictionary specifies flavor only, with a parenthetical note that the British spelling happens to be flavour. But in American English, flavour is not an acceptable spelling.
On a side note, the web community seems to need help with their spelling too. Consider:
In the real world, fog screens tend to make terrible pileups on the highways where the crashes aren't so pretend.
As far as amusement parks, good luck trying to keep a laminar airflow while a high velocity vehicle whizes by. And forget outdoors, the breeze would carry your image away, that's if you could even see it in the sunlight. Probably more useful in a haunted house ride...life-like ghosts, and cool the airflow and you also get the chill down the back of your neck too.
No, I feel there is still some distinction. An mp3 file (or the unencumbered ogg-vorbis) is not strictly just an idea, it does have some tangible existence and some utility.
In general (and this is way overly simplified), patents deal with ideas, while copyrights deal with tangible products. Although the lines are very blurry, and there usually is some idea behind every product. This is the main reason why I find patents so much more offensive than copyrights (although both are frequently abused).
I still strongly agree that copying a file is not stealing as it doesn't meet my previous three conditions. It is simply copying. And if you don't have permissions to make the copy (whether implicitly by law such as fair use or directly from the copyright holder), then your copying is more specifically unauthorized copying.
But the word stealing has no place in either type of infringement. Also whether you call it stealing or something else has nothing to do with whether it is legal or moral.
Yes, I'm pretty sure I've seen the posting,
many, many times on slashdot :-/ But I
have to admit, I've never seen anything "cowered".
Why do people always use the wrong words? You can not steal an idea, except perhaps in some far-out science fiction where neuron transplants occur (Spock's brain?).
Now you can copy my idea, you can be inspired by my ideas, you can derive the same idea I had by examining some tangible expression of the idea (e.g., product reverse engineering), or you can have the same idea as me all on your own. The later is actualy the most likely reason why two individuals have the same idea, they just had the same thoughts. Thoughts are not mutually exclusive.
Now, you can steal blueprints, computer printouts, prototypes, webservers, money, or even customers; practically anything that's tangible and where ownership is by nature mutually exclusive. But you can not steal ideas.
If I actually could steal your idea, then three things must be true:
Short of that, it's simply not stealing. So the headline should have more correctly read:
Ooops, *blush*, I computed wrong. Okay, the correct number is 20.09 bits.
There are 1112063 possible codepoints (0x10ffff - 2048). Taking the log-base-2 you get approximately 20.09. Still WAY less that 21-bits, which was my main point, but yes it is slightly more than 20-bits too. So I stand corrected. (Of course if you don't count surrogates which are not real characters....)
Umm, not to nitpick too much since your point is entirely correct.
But it's really 20-bit, not 21-bit. The maximum codepoint is U+10FFFF. But since 0 is not a valid codepoint, there's really only 20-bits worth of information there, not 21 (actually its more like 19.8 bits since some codepoints are permamently unassigned). Remember, UCS codepoints are abstract numbers, not specific bit patterns; so you have to measure information content, not the number of bits it takes if you just happen to choose a particular binary representation like two's-complement.
But I do have to strongly agree that so many people seem confused and always think Unicode is 16-bits, which is just plain wrong! And most people who use UTF-16 sadly don't even know anything about surrogate pairs...they think they're using a fixed-width encoding, but UTF-16 is in fact a variable-width encoding just like UTF-8!
"Feature creep?" You mean like fiction writers inventing new alphabets and languages like Elvish? It's Unicode that's trying to bring some uniformity and saneness to this human condition of Babel.
Your problem is that you're confusing the Universal Character Set (UCS), which is the core of Unicode, with a character encoding, such as UTF-xx and so forth. UTF-16 is NOT Unicode! When will that myth ever die? Perhaps you should go visit the Unicode Consortium home page and read through some of their FAQs.
And there's way more than just three encodings, but there's only one Unicode (actually there's ISO If these Elvish characters are more than just a curious fad then what's wrong with assigning them Unicode code points? The only problem would be doing so prematurely before all the characters have been reasonably deteremined and stable. Giving them codepoints allows font designers and other software applications to unambiguously exchange Elvish text. Granted though, the Unicode Consortium is primarily concerned with real human languages rather than inventions of fiction.
As far as encodings, keep in mind that Unicode is essentially a 20-bit character set allowing slightly more than one million separate characters to be defined (I say 20-bits loosely since the UCS codepoints really don't map to bits at all). So even your beloved UTF-16 (or the older UCS-2) is unnecessarily messy; having to use the low and high surrogate pairs to properly encode the entire UCS repertoire. Not to mention things like byte order issues and so forth.
This is why I actually love UTF-8, it is actually very simple and easy to work with. I think a lot of people get scared-off because it is variable-width, but for anybody who has actually coded using it, it is a very nice and easy to use encoding. Of course people primarily communicating in non-Latin languages may have other opinions. That's fine too.
As far as Project Gutenberg selecting US-ASCII, well, it sure looks identical to UTF-8 to me! In fact ASCII text is identical to UTF-8 text (but not the other way around). Now when they start archiving lots of non-English public domain texts, well, they may start rethinking the ASCII limitations and I'd be very surprised if UTF-8 is not the adopted character encoding. In fact they could just make the policy change right now, and they'd have to retype exactly zero documents in their collection.
My blessed magic marker keeps drying out when I try to write those complex spellbooks that I can never seem to read. Not to mention all those monsters that keep ignoring my hastily engraved Elbereth; here I've been using the wrong font all along. Stupid tourist!
It's a good thing this guy didn't break any patents on roller coasters. Although to be fair, most of those have expired, and patents on actual physical machines are palatable.
Oh, does this remind anybody else of the Cartmanland episode of South Park where Cartman owns his own theme park?
Who would patent just half the method?
I sure hope he didn't mean they're trying to patent the entire concept of encrypting zip files regardless of the algorithm or method. Because I've been encrypting zip files (among many other types) for a decade.
What's an extension? I use Content-Types like application/x-patented-zip and name all my Zip(TM) files "archive.this.is.not.tar", and when I am forced to use Windows I never see an "extension".
Seriously, the true value of their intellectual "property" (sic) is that of their trademarked brand name. As an archive format it is pretty uninteresting. Everybody knows what "zip" means. Adding a patent in this area to me seems like a dumb move; another one of those all-to-common desparation moves by a failing company to have the USPTO save it. In the late 1990s companies looked for VC firms to save them from their own shortcomings, today the trendy savior seems to be the USPTO.
To me this move just screams "Use our patented technology to secure your important files....BTW you must use only our software and we can revoke your rights to use our patent at any time rendering your important files so secure that not even you can read them legally again!" That's enough to keep me from using their format; it's my data and I don't want my access to it to be contingent upon some party outside of my control.
I think you're confused here. I'm talking about information, not cars. And we're talking about the government, not some corporation or your parents. The government has a social responsibility to insure that the information it produces for its citizens is completely free and open for consumption. Ever notice that the Constitution is not copyrighted?
If Microsoft wants to enhance Word so it can produce output in some non-binary 100% open format, then I have no real objection. Heck, MS could even charge a lot more for this extra feature. There's nothing keeping commercial vendors from supplying tools. But the documents that the government produces with those tools had better not require that it's citizens have to enter into EULA's with Microsoft, nor should it require that I obtain patent licenses in order to read it. Nor should I have to trust only one company that it's product is not distorting or altering the documents that I view, or secretly tracking all people who happen to read the DMCA legislation.
If cost is your sole concern here, then why not just recommend that the Government write all their laws and regulations as DRM-enhanced encrypted eBooks. Then they could sell them to citizens for income. If you want to obey the law, you have to pay to read the law. See how much nonsense that is.
So the real power that OSS has is that by its very nature it makes the "open" requirement of the government very easy to achieve. But if a corporation wants to produce a proprietary and expensive application that may work better than an OSS counterpart, then all the better. But it can not in any way subvert the genuine openness of the government to its citizens by their use of the product.
You're on the right track. It seems that everybody is missing the most important point, that of the "open" in open source software, which is the most important thing for Government use. Although cost should be an issue, it is not nearly as important as openness. The government is around to serve the people, and must make it's "output" must remain free, as in freedom, to all.
The government's "outputs" are of course things like laws and regulations, research, census statistics, environment and geological surveys, budgets, and so on. All of those things should be made available to the public who pay for it without restrictions. And that means that all the document formats used should not be beholden to copyright and patent ridden proprietary corporate software.
Just consider the National Archives, which publishes the Federal Register (the offical US publication which announces regulations and so forth. They have long understood that freedom concept and make all these regulations available as PDF and text, as well as their traditional paper-printed forms. There are no MS Word documents there, no encrypted eBooks. It is important that the public have free access to those publications, and that they remain perfectly readable 20 years from now (long after old Word versions become unreadable by the newer versions). Also it is important that the public be able to trust that what they are reading is authentic. Can I really trust Word to not recognize that when I'm reading a regulation on software piracy it silently inserts an extra little Microsoft sentence? Well, actually MS is not that evil, but the point is that I have no way to really know, the Word format is binary and proprietary and I can't verify that Word is displaying the correct output as I can't examine it's source or recompile it from source.
Governments should adopt OSS not for it's potential price benifits, but philosophically because it is open.
Forgot about the ICANN whois database? It's just full of bogus records. The honey is bountiful and overflowing :-)
ha ha. Yes, but the premise was different. In the movie you were basically guilty just for thinking (having the intent). In the real US (as I should have clarified), you need to have both the intent and have performed some action which progresses toward that intent, i.e., you bought a smartcard reader. This is BTW why many of the Ten Commandments are also codified in US Law (such as murder), but not all of them (such as coveting). We humans just can't fairly enforce law based only on intent or thought only. But guess what? Law suits designed for intimidation and settlement can be based soley on intent, and yes, they are often unfair.
Since showing intent is obviously a highly subjective and murky decision (without Tome Cruise's special mind-reading future-telling technology), the establishment of guilt is very much in a perpetual gray area and very expensive to argue before a court. That's why DirecTV doesn't really want these suits to go to trial, and also who almost everybody will settle, the guilty and innocent alike.
Clearly these suits are not designed to go to court; they are designed to get people to turn themselves in and get these devices off the street. US$3500 is too cheap for anybody who really is guilty by intent to take it to court. And the "guilty" probably are the majority of the people who bought from those sites.
Of course the problem is those who are innocent. Courts have shown in the past that if you buy a device like this with the intent to perform a crime, then you are guilty even if you didn't carry through on that crime. And as the sites advertised as such, showing that was your intent is much easier.
However there are very legitimate uses for these devices, just as the article shows, and innocent people will get caught up in this. Just because the site may advertise this device as being useful for cracking DirecTV, I may very well buy it for other purposes if the price was cheap. Think about someone selling hardened-steel axes for $5.00 with the advert "You can chop down your neighbor's door with this!"...but at $5.00 I would probably buy one to cut my firewood. If it's not inherently an illegal device (which smartcard programmers are not) and my intended use was not illegal then I did nothing wrong. My intented use doesn't have to match that of the advertiser.
Until this point I've actually respected DirecTV's anti-piracy approach; mainly by counter-hacking and outsmarting the illegal crackers. But now they are going to snare a lot of innocent folks in an expensive legal trap, and setting a bad example for other corporations to try. The innocent should be able to beat this without too much effort, but it will sadly cost them a lot of money and time to prove their innocence.
Pursuit of fleeing vehicles is much more common in LA, but the West Palm Beach folks are very fond of pursuing rental trucks full of votes to be recounted. So now they are just chasing a truck load of canned pork, doesn't really surprise me much.
I used to think there was a choice too, when I was younger. I've since learned that no matter how screwed up you thing the corporate world and the PHB's are, it's much worse than that. I've got stories that make yours seem like a decision between chocolate and strawberry ice cream. They should start teaching this stuff in college rather than engineering idealism! There's no way you can ever win; just retire and work on Open Source where you can do things the way you want to. I so envy Linus' I'll release when it's done position.
I just know there's some sort of Nethack joke here!
You can get the same effect without a computer. Just hold the end of a phone line with one hand and anything metal and gounded with the other and have somebdy call you. If anything this is a defect with the phone system, not the freaking computer!
This is because the phone company sends a 60-volt (if I remember correctly) pulse down the line to cause a ring...a leftover from the days when it they had to send enough energy to drive the electomechanical bell.
No, what you really need to do is to trick spammers into sending snippets of music along with their messages rather than porn.
Then we just unleash the RIAA on them and the spammers will be sued for $18,000,000,000,000.39 and all their machines will be hacked into and rendered inoperable. After all we all know that spammy pirates (not the pork-eating swashbuckling variety) are way more dangerous to the world than any sort of hate-filled terrorist or unethical bulk advertiser (that's what the **AA tells Congress anyway).
Perhaps Adobe should work with Lexmark to help them out with the crypto coding; you know, that great company that protects the consumer against accidentally using cheap ink with strong cryptographic chips. Then Adobe could not only provide a PDF option to prevent you from printing a document, they could also enforce that if printed, a PDF document will only be printed with 100%-genuine Lexmark toner. Oh, I see another option with Kodak here, perhaps by embedding RFID tags directly in that specical Kodak paper.
BTW, did anyone notice that with the latest PDF specification, version 1.5, which corresponds to Acrobat 6, that they added verbage to the copyright/license part to enforce that all software which implements the PDF specification must obey all those stupid magic security bits? They claim the specification is open and free for anybody to develop software around it, but that since the "format" is copyrighted all independently developed software must obey their fragile DRM schemes. How in the world can they copyright a format; sure their specification is copyrighted being a printed work, but the "format"?
Don't know about that, but playing nethack has given me the urge to get naked and go hunting for @-nurses to hit.