I suspect the submitter is trying to be clever by implying that the final test was whether commanders in the field would accept and use it - which for whatever reason they have elected not to do at this time.
Interesting... are you talking about how things are, or how you want them to be?
The reason I ask is, if such a blanket statement were a true description of civil liability, I don't think the EFF would spend so much time talking about how to limit your liability when you publish a vulnerability (i.e. utter true statements).
What I'd really like to see is a citation to some case history, since little else is meaningful in predicting how civil liability will play out; but I've been unable to find one.
Not owing someone something, doesn't mean you can act without regard to that person. I don't owe you anything, but I still have to stop at a crosswalk if you're walking through it.
The question isn't "do I owe you anything?" as though disclosure were inaction and delaying disclosure were action I might undertake as a favor. Disclosure itself is an action, and the question is "if I do this, am I liable for resulting harm that may befall you?"
I know you want to say "no, it's the fault of whoever wrote the software in the first place, and of the guy who actually committed the attack". Welcome to the real world of shared blame. If a court were to find that a specific attack occured because of your disclosure and would not have occured otherwise, you may be held partially liable to that attack's victim even if your disclosure ultimlately prevented many more attacks.
If you want to pressure a company to fix vulnerabilities, educate the public about the risk potential associated with their product. Put weapons in the enemy's hands at your own peril; you can assume they'd eventually figure it out without your help, but I wouldn't assume a court will agree with that assessment.
It's probably worse than that. GP didn't give us much to go on about the nature of the attack, but generally a flaw described in such severe terms either (1) offers a foot in the door for the attacker to go after other systems on the network, or (2) exposes sensitive information. By contrast with flaws that allow DoS (for example), it isn't typically obvious when a flaw of that type is exploited.
So the question isn't "how do you know someone won't discover the flaw? what will you do when you notice it being exploited?" The question is "how do you know someone hasn't discovered the flaw? would you notice if it's already been exploited?"
If the flaw is that severe and the vendor won't budge, silence is not an appropriate response. I question whether GP has the close ties to the security community that he insinuates.
There are 12 backward states, and Maryland is one of them, where all parties must consent to an audio recording. The details of that do vary from state to state, and I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of Maryland law, so if you need to know for sure get a lawyer; but:
Consent to record is typically meant to be applied to recording of phone calls, etc., but it is not at all uncommon for it to be applied to audiotaping a face-to-face conversation, or videotaping same if there is an audio track recorded with the video. Don't confuse the right to photograph anything in a public place (which does typically extend to the video component of your recording) with the right to make and audio recording; in many jurisdictions they are not the same.
As a special case, I believe that a police officer performing his duty in a public place should be required to always implicitly consent to recording. But my belief of how it should be doesn't mean that's how it is.
"Are they going to press charges? Do you think that site created by a lone developer has the legal resources to do that against that many offenders?"
Based on their quotes about willingness to share information with "enforcement agencies", it rather sounds like they believe the offenders are violating criminal law and hoping the state will prosecute accordingly. If that's so, they don't really need legal resources. That would be more a question if they wanted to pursue civil litigation (such as claiming damages in the context of a ToS violation), but it doesn't sound like they want to do that (probably because they lack the legal resources).
I don't know what criminal laws they suspect are being violated, and I don't know if they're right.
But the point is, the concept of "pressing charges" as seen in TV and movies is bunk. You as an individual can pursue civil litigation, but the decision of whether to pursue criminal prosecution belongs to the authorities. You can tip them off, ask them to investigate, give them what information you have; and then they decide what to do, at the taxpayer's expense.
If we never saw the top fall at any point in the movie, that would be a reasonable explanation. I'm almost 100% sure we did, though - specifically, juxtaposed with the dialog in which he explained that in a dream it never falls.
wonder how many boxes of Kraft dinner i could buy with the money they spend on any TWO of the various r&d efforts over the centuries that led to a world in which it's possible for me to cheaply buy a box of Kraft dinner
Several interpretations are possible; yours is not one of them.
In the scene you mention, you suggest that Saito shot Cobb to send him to limbo; not possible, as they were already in limbo. The only precident we have for what happens if you die in Limbo is - you wake up. So the ambiguity of that scene is, did Saito actually shoot Cobb (waking him up), or not? That we didn't see the gunshot suggests not, and we are not told what happens instead.
There is also no possibility that Saito performed inception, particularly not by telling Cobb something while he was awake.
That's not law? Funny, because it's exactly how the majority of law in the U.S. works. The statute defers to regulations, and the regulations then have the force of law as given to them by the statute. This particular statute puts structure around the regulations, forcing them to be somewhat more dynamic than you might expect, but that's really neither here nor there.
The copyright office's exemptions absolutely have the effect of changing what is legal, because the DMCA says so. What is or is not legal changes without the passage or signing of a new bill; it happens all the time.
Getting people to disagree is not the same as falsifying a claim.
Sure, you can probably get two (or more) religions to offer mutually contradictory claims (though that's actually a lot harder than you may assume); but while you would have to conclude that one of them has claimed something that is incorrect, you wouldn't have proven any individual claim to be incorrect.
I don't personally care for the way GP expresses the problem with classifying creationism as science. It's correct, but it comes across as though science were a game and creationism doesn't get to play because it's not fair that it doesn't risk falsification. That's not quite the issue. The issue is that creationism offers nothing to test, and science is about testing things.
'It merely says at some point "there's no point looking for why here" and that ends science.'
I'd say that depends a bit on the particular brand of creationism in question, but generally I agree.
However, be careful just how derisively you treat that attitude. The vast majority of "sceintifically-minded" people treat the big bang in exactly the same way. "Oh, that was the beginning; alright then."
'Every time science answers a question "why's that, then?" god gets a little slimmer.'
Only to people with very limited understanding of both religion and science. But, we are talking about a school board in LA, so you may have a point.
Study philosophy of science a bit and see how fond you remain of the phrase "scientific truth".
Science produces useful models that describe our experiences; nothing more, and nothing less. "Force is equal to mass times acceleration" is not a true statement about the universe; but it is a very useful model.
"The method used to distinguish these things is the word "theory". That is a special word used by scientists to denote ideas which they acknowledge are either yet to be tested, or are untestable in whole or part. "
Wow. You better look up the word "theory".
A scientific assertion that is yet to be tested is a hypothesis. An assertion that cannot be tested is not a scientific assertion at all.
I'm wondering what you think something is called once it's been tested.
String theory? Are you just troling, or hoping nobody notices that the same criteria we use to distinguish ID from science (lack of testable predictions) thus far applies to string theory as well?
Anyway, I wouldn't be too sure that the numbers would differ so much when you talk only about cosmologists. The only way to hold science and religion as diametrically opposed views is if you take mindlessly literal interpretations of both.
The question isn't whether they wrote any code, or whether they wrote good code; the question is whether they wrote that code.
I'm questioning the belief that they did, because they claim the infringement is from code they bought rights to (except according to the courts they didn't).
"the people at exbiblio found that there is very little repetition of text in literature"
And in that particular GP is almost certainly wrong, but in spirit what GP is saying is still valid.
There are more constraints making one piece of code look like another, than there are making one piece of literature look like another. (Maybe I'm trying to say there are more things that can vary more freely in literature; I'm kind of struggling for the right word or phrase.)
1) A coder might be trying to conform to patterns, style guidelines, standards, protocols, and (obviously) the basic syntax of the language. Some forms of literature have conventions they follow, but generally an author is motivated to be creative and original in respects that would render software useless.
2) Literature is written in natural languages with massive vocabularies and complex gramaatical structures with countless variations. Computer programs are written in made-up languages most of which consider it a virtue to be compact in their vocabulary and structural rules. (Insert your favorite joke about how huge modern programming languages are getting here, but then reflect on the size of those language compared to English.)
These code samples are ridiculous, obviously. Pointing to the protective #ifdef at the top of a header file? This had to be generated by a diff tool. At that level of granularity any two coders are going to write some matching code when doing similar things, especially when there are standards and protocols they're both following.
But more than that, this demonstrates nicely why I've said before, and will say again, that I don't believe copyright is a good fit for computer code.
1) The information is very functional (as opposed to expressive) in nature. I question whether programs should be considered "works of authorship" within the meaning of U.S.C. Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec 102; it certainly doesn't seem to fit in. (Yes, I'm aware that the law specifically mentions computer programs in its current form; I'm questioning not whether it does, but whether it should.)
2) Arguably entire lines of code are really like words or even just characters in actual English (or other natural-language) works.
Taken together, this seems no different than if, say, GPS manufacturers were to claim copyright infringement over phrases like "in 2 miles", "turn left", "keep right", etc.
To the extent that the resulting program is expressive, you might argue differently... typically we might be talking about games with a cinematic element. Characters and distinct images may be trademarked, the game mechanics are AFAIK nigh on impossible to protect, and if anything the story behind the game could be under copyright.
Concurrent innovation is a major problem with the existing system; the problem I have is, I can't think of any solution that's "always" just.
I'm aware there are those who think the just solution is to do away with patents; I'm unconvinced. The ways in which the fruits of an inventor's labor can be stolen with no patent system are more common and more blatant; if you do away with patents I believe you have to replace them with something else, and you'll still have to deal with the problem of concurrent innovation in that replacement system.
I suspect we're reaching a point where it becomes possible to document creative work sufficiently, so that we could set standards for proving independent and concurrent innovation and award both inventors with patents; but the system will still never be perfect. (With how much certainty can you "prove" you didn't know about another's work? How much expense can be imposed to involve 3rd parties in ways that really verify timestamps?)
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect the submitter is trying to be clever by implying that the final test was whether commanders in the field would accept and use it - which for whatever reason they have elected not to do at this time.
Interesting... are you talking about how things are, or how you want them to be?
The reason I ask is, if such a blanket statement were a true description of civil liability, I don't think the EFF would spend so much time talking about how to limit your liability when you publish a vulnerability (i.e. utter true statements).
For example...
What I'd really like to see is a citation to some case history, since little else is meaningful in predicting how civil liability will play out; but I've been unable to find one.
You plan to rely on Tor to access a service that wants to know your IP address?
I guess maybe I'm not familiar enough with Tor, but why wouldn't chatroulette just refuse traffic from the Tor exit nodes?
Not owing someone something, doesn't mean you can act without regard to that person. I don't owe you anything, but I still have to stop at a crosswalk if you're walking through it.
The question isn't "do I owe you anything?" as though disclosure were inaction and delaying disclosure were action I might undertake as a favor. Disclosure itself is an action, and the question is "if I do this, am I liable for resulting harm that may befall you?"
I know you want to say "no, it's the fault of whoever wrote the software in the first place, and of the guy who actually committed the attack". Welcome to the real world of shared blame. If a court were to find that a specific attack occured because of your disclosure and would not have occured otherwise, you may be held partially liable to that attack's victim even if your disclosure ultimlately prevented many more attacks.
If you want to pressure a company to fix vulnerabilities, educate the public about the risk potential associated with their product. Put weapons in the enemy's hands at your own peril; you can assume they'd eventually figure it out without your help, but I wouldn't assume a court will agree with that assessment.
It's probably worse than that. GP didn't give us much to go on about the nature of the attack, but generally a flaw described in such severe terms either (1) offers a foot in the door for the attacker to go after other systems on the network, or (2) exposes sensitive information. By contrast with flaws that allow DoS (for example), it isn't typically obvious when a flaw of that type is exploited.
So the question isn't "how do you know someone won't discover the flaw? what will you do when you notice it being exploited?" The question is "how do you know someone hasn't discovered the flaw? would you notice if it's already been exploited?"
If the flaw is that severe and the vendor won't budge, silence is not an appropriate response. I question whether GP has the close ties to the security community that he insinuates.
It's not quite that clear-cut.
There are 12 backward states, and Maryland is one of them, where all parties must consent to an audio recording. The details of that do vary from state to state, and I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of Maryland law, so if you need to know for sure get a lawyer; but:
Consent to record is typically meant to be applied to recording of phone calls, etc., but it is not at all uncommon for it to be applied to audiotaping a face-to-face conversation, or videotaping same if there is an audio track recorded with the video. Don't confuse the right to photograph anything in a public place (which does typically extend to the video component of your recording) with the right to make and audio recording; in many jurisdictions they are not the same.
As a special case, I believe that a police officer performing his duty in a public place should be required to always implicitly consent to recording. But my belief of how it should be doesn't mean that's how it is.
It seems the point you may be missing is, chatroulette doesn't want to be in that business in the first place; hence TFA.
"Are they going to press charges? Do you think that site created by a lone developer has the legal resources to do that against that many offenders?"
Based on their quotes about willingness to share information with "enforcement agencies", it rather sounds like they believe the offenders are violating criminal law and hoping the state will prosecute accordingly. If that's so, they don't really need legal resources. That would be more a question if they wanted to pursue civil litigation (such as claiming damages in the context of a ToS violation), but it doesn't sound like they want to do that (probably because they lack the legal resources).
I don't know what criminal laws they suspect are being violated, and I don't know if they're right.
But the point is, the concept of "pressing charges" as seen in TV and movies is bunk. You as an individual can pursue civil litigation, but the decision of whether to pursue criminal prosecution belongs to the authorities. You can tip them off, ask them to investigate, give them what information you have; and then they decide what to do, at the taxpayer's expense.
If we never saw the top fall at any point in the movie, that would be a reasonable explanation. I'm almost 100% sure we did, though - specifically, juxtaposed with the dialog in which he explained that in a dream it never falls.
wonder how many boxes of Kraft dinner i could buy with the money they spend on any TWO of the various r&d efforts over the centuries that led to a world in which it's possible for me to cheaply buy a box of Kraft dinner
Several interpretations are possible; yours is not one of them.
In the scene you mention, you suggest that Saito shot Cobb to send him to limbo; not possible, as they were already in limbo. The only precident we have for what happens if you die in Limbo is - you wake up. So the ambiguity of that scene is, did Saito actually shoot Cobb (waking him up), or not? That we didn't see the gunshot suggests not, and we are not told what happens instead.
There is also no possibility that Saito performed inception, particularly not by telling Cobb something while he was awake.
That's not law? Funny, because it's exactly how the majority of law in the U.S. works. The statute defers to regulations, and the regulations then have the force of law as given to them by the statute. This particular statute puts structure around the regulations, forcing them to be somewhat more dynamic than you might expect, but that's really neither here nor there.
The copyright office's exemptions absolutely have the effect of changing what is legal, because the DMCA says so. What is or is not legal changes without the passage or signing of a new bill; it happens all the time.
Getting people to disagree is not the same as falsifying a claim.
Sure, you can probably get two (or more) religions to offer mutually contradictory claims (though that's actually a lot harder than you may assume); but while you would have to conclude that one of them has claimed something that is incorrect, you wouldn't have proven any individual claim to be incorrect.
I don't personally care for the way GP expresses the problem with classifying creationism as science. It's correct, but it comes across as though science were a game and creationism doesn't get to play because it's not fair that it doesn't risk falsification. That's not quite the issue. The issue is that creationism offers nothing to test, and science is about testing things.
'It merely says at some point "there's no point looking for why here" and that ends science.'
I'd say that depends a bit on the particular brand of creationism in question, but generally I agree.
However, be careful just how derisively you treat that attitude. The vast majority of "sceintifically-minded" people treat the big bang in exactly the same way. "Oh, that was the beginning; alright then."
'Every time science answers a question "why's that, then?" god gets a little slimmer.'
Only to people with very limited understanding of both religion and science. But, we are talking about a school board in LA, so you may have a point.
Study philosophy of science a bit and see how fond you remain of the phrase "scientific truth".
Science produces useful models that describe our experiences; nothing more, and nothing less. "Force is equal to mass times acceleration" is not a true statement about the universe; but it is a very useful model.
"String theory might not be science yet"
Which is the entirety of what I said about it, your thin-skinned whining notwithstanding.
"but equating it with Intelligent Design is disingenuous"
In terms of their standing as science - the only thing I commented on or had reason to comment on - it is not.
"The method used to distinguish these things is the word "theory". That is a special word used by scientists to denote ideas which they acknowledge are either yet to be tested, or are untestable in whole or part. "
Wow. You better look up the word "theory".
A scientific assertion that is yet to be tested is a hypothesis. An assertion that cannot be tested is not a scientific assertion at all.
I'm wondering what you think something is called once it's been tested.
String theory? Are you just troling, or hoping nobody notices that the same criteria we use to distinguish ID from science (lack of testable predictions) thus far applies to string theory as well?
Anyway, I wouldn't be too sure that the numbers would differ so much when you talk only about cosmologists. The only way to hold science and religion as diametrically opposed views is if you take mindlessly literal interpretations of both.
The first oddity is why you think data would stop being used after some finite time period.
The second oddity is that you clearly don't understand how corporate organizations use encryption on laptops once they decide to do it.
The question isn't whether they wrote any code, or whether they wrote good code; the question is whether they wrote that code.
I'm questioning the belief that they did, because they claim the infringement is from code they bought rights to (except according to the courts they didn't).
"the people at exbiblio found that there is very little repetition of text in literature"
And in that particular GP is almost certainly wrong, but in spirit what GP is saying is still valid.
There are more constraints making one piece of code look like another, than there are making one piece of literature look like another. (Maybe I'm trying to say there are more things that can vary more freely in literature; I'm kind of struggling for the right word or phrase.)
1) A coder might be trying to conform to patterns, style guidelines, standards, protocols, and (obviously) the basic syntax of the language. Some forms of literature have conventions they follow, but generally an author is motivated to be creative and original in respects that would render software useless.
2) Literature is written in natural languages with massive vocabularies and complex gramaatical structures with countless variations. Computer programs are written in made-up languages most of which consider it a virtue to be compact in their vocabulary and structural rules. (Insert your favorite joke about how huge modern programming languages are getting here, but then reflect on the size of those language compared to English.)
"some of the differences I'm seeing in these files are from SCO not implementing POSIX properly"
You really think SCO wrote any of that code?
These code samples are ridiculous, obviously. Pointing to the protective #ifdef at the top of a header file? This had to be generated by a diff tool. At that level of granularity any two coders are going to write some matching code when doing similar things, especially when there are standards and protocols they're both following.
But more than that, this demonstrates nicely why I've said before, and will say again, that I don't believe copyright is a good fit for computer code.
1) The information is very functional (as opposed to expressive) in nature. I question whether programs should be considered "works of authorship" within the meaning of U.S.C. Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec 102; it certainly doesn't seem to fit in. (Yes, I'm aware that the law specifically mentions computer programs in its current form; I'm questioning not whether it does, but whether it should.)
2) Arguably entire lines of code are really like words or even just characters in actual English (or other natural-language) works.
Taken together, this seems no different than if, say, GPS manufacturers were to claim copyright infringement over phrases like "in 2 miles", "turn left", "keep right", etc.
To the extent that the resulting program is expressive, you might argue differently... typically we might be talking about games with a cinematic element. Characters and distinct images may be trademarked, the game mechanics are AFAIK nigh on impossible to protect, and if anything the story behind the game could be under copyright.
"OO" stands for "Up"? Close, but no cigar.
FUBAR is the acronym you're looking for.
The origins of FOO are murky at best, but may also have been related to the military.
It's reasonable to assume that FOOBAR is a corruption / combination of the two.
Concurrent innovation is a major problem with the existing system; the problem I have is, I can't think of any solution that's "always" just.
I'm aware there are those who think the just solution is to do away with patents; I'm unconvinced. The ways in which the fruits of an inventor's labor can be stolen with no patent system are more common and more blatant; if you do away with patents I believe you have to replace them with something else, and you'll still have to deal with the problem of concurrent innovation in that replacement system.
I suspect we're reaching a point where it becomes possible to document creative work sufficiently, so that we could set standards for proving independent and concurrent innovation and award both inventors with patents; but the system will still never be perfect. (With how much certainty can you "prove" you didn't know about another's work? How much expense can be imposed to involve 3rd parties in ways that really verify timestamps?)