But, they can't encrypt the data in such a way that it can't be viewed. As long as the software needs to decrypt it to check for a match, they can't encrypt it in such a way that the hacker can't simply replicate whatever the software does. They could use a one-way hash, like unix passwords (all good password systems, actually) which would be unreversible, but this is probably beyond their skill. (Mattel isn't a company known for great software, and their software sounds like the bottom of the barrel anyways.)
Actually, some of the data was one-way hashed in a way that made it impossible to uniquely decrypt, as you would know if you had read the original analysis. The list consisted of a list of sites, some of which were blocked completely, and some of which had only some subdirectories blocked. The subdirectory blocks were handled by hashing the subdirectory names and storing the hashes. This both made the list more compact (no more than 32 bits were needed for any subdirectory, no matter how long its name) and made perfect decryption impossible. In fact, the authors pointed out that it was necessary to do a dictionary-type attack on the subdirectory list in order to find out what directories were actually blocked.
Far more interesting than the file on Einstein or Mickey Mantle, IMO, is that they've got a bunch of stuff on cattle mutilation, Project Blue Book, and related X-Files type stuff. Maybe the truth really is out there.
In my opinion, this is one great, saving feature of the GPL; if at some time the FSF decides that the license needs to be changed, they can affect so, so many pieces of software in existence.
While many may feel that giving this sort of licensing power to the FSF is a bad thing, there are many of us here who feel that the FSF has good intentions, and will appropriately yield the power to release our code in a good manner if we pass on.
Actually, one of the very nice things about this is that changes in the license this way work like a ratchet; they can make things more favorable for the licensee but never less favorable.
Suppose, for instance, that I license my software under GLP 2.0 or later. A few years down the road, RMS sells his soul to Satan and releases GPL 6.6.6 that requires you to send your firstborn to FSF in order to use any software licensed under it. Users of my program are still perfectly fine, though, because they retain the right to license under a version between 2.0 and 6.6.6. OTOH, if the courts find some flaw in 2.0 that prevents licesees from doing something that they want to do, they can still use the hypothetical 3.0 that repairs the hole that the court found.
Of course, this isn't actually limited to the GPL. The Perl license, for instance, lets you license under either GLP or Artistic License- and you don't actually have to choose or tell anyone which one you're licensing under.
Hopefully not too much of a focus, since they are a non-profit organization. But realistically, yes, most likely true.
I work for a non-profit, and I can assure you that one of the wisest things I've heard is, "Just because the company doesn't make a profit doesn't mean that nobody does." Not having to make a profit just means that the people in charge can keep money above breakeven rather than having to dole it out to shareholders. There are dozens of ways of doing this that are perfectly legal.
My company went through ISO 9000 a few years ago, and the basic idea is the same as TrustE: Say what you do, do what you say.
In my mind, it doesn't mean that the company is any better organized than others, but it means that their business process is in a book somewhere and they follow what's in the book. Reviewers don't care what the actual processes are, as long as there's enough documentation to prove that those processes are followed.
Sounds like TrustE is doing the same thing: Does this company have a privacy policy for web-based information? Do they follow it?
Of course, there's a classic Dilbert strip on this topic. The dialog goes something like:
PHB: So you don't actually care what our procedures are, so long as they're documented and followed consistently?
Customer: That's right
PHB: In that case, our documented procedure says that I'm supposed to laugh at you and double our price
TrustE sounds a little bit better than that (they do have some minimal requirements about their policies, apparently), but not much. It sounds, for instance, as though TrustE thinks that it's perfectly OK for a company to promise not to sell your personal information, then change its policy without notification and sell it if you come back to visit its site- even if you don't stay around for long enough to read the revised privacy policy.
One resource I'd strongly recommend is the National Center for Biotechnology Information. I'm a professional working in the field of Proteomics (the protein equivalent of Genomics) and NCBI is an outstanding clearinghouse of information. It also has good links to other sites. If you really want to see some of the science that's going on using genomic information (and are willing to put up with a somewhat dry, utilitarian attitude), it's a good place to look.
Didn't the surveyor, which was running after the lander crashed, find these already?
In a word, no. They've already known a lot about visible outbreak channels just based on photographic evidence, but these are actually buried. The were found by doing tricks with gravitometers and the like. The Mars stuff at JPL is definitely worth looking at. The high resolution topographic maps from MOLA are particularly interesting- especially while reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.
was thinking about wearing by DVD-CCA t-shirt..anyone have suggestions on how to approach (first time talking to a congressamn) or good URLs that I can give him?
I'd advice against the T-shirt. It will make you look like a far out wacko, rather than an ordinary concerned citizen. Politicians are much more receptive to concerns of the mainstream than far out elements; after all, many more voters are in the mainstream than the fringes.
It would probably also pay to spend a bit of effort researching the guy you're going to talk to. If you know what his personal hot buttons are, you're much more likely to be able to find some angle on the issue that's really convincing to him. I know that it sounds awfully cynical, but everyone draws their conclusions differently, and you need to know what kind of argument is likely to convince your target.
Abandoning an old business model doesn't necessarily mean killing profits. The trick is, you need a new model to replace the old. They're out there, waiting to be discovered. The only reason no one's thought of then is that there's never been a need for them; why worry about economies of abundance when this world is an economy of scarcity, no matter where you go?
I don't dispute that it will be possible to make money in the new economy, nor that some people can become very wealthy in the process. The point is that an economy of abundance is almost certainly going to be less profitable than an economy of scarcity (from a producer standpoint at least) because people have a limited ability to consume. That's what produces the abundance in the first place; people can get their hands on more stuff than they can consume. That inherently means, though, that it's a buyers' market because supply outstrips demand, and buyers' markets drive down profitability.
Now there are certainly are places in this system to make money. One, as someone has pointed out, is by providing information and services to people who are overwhelmed with choices. Another is to produce something with value added that can't be kept effectively by copying- like very time-sensitive information. The most obvious, of course, is to produce the physical goods that make the digital abundance possible- routers, fiber optics, digital recording media, home music studios, etc.
It is a very legitimate argument to say that, for example, the music industry needs the goverment to step in to help them protect their property. If the government didn't step in to stop people from getting MP3s for free, the practice of buying CDs would be less prevalent (which Katz shows very well in Geeks).
The counterargument, though, is that copyright and IP rights in general are not natural rights in the same way that other property rights are. They are created rights that were invented by society to benefit the public by encouraging creativity. Thus the government is only obligated to protect those rights to the extent that it is generally beneficial. If the web is structured so that it is more beneficial that IP have less protection, then that's the way that it ought to be.
The truth is, corporations are scared of the Net. They're afraid that it'll kill off their precious profits. The fact is it won't, but corporations have to adapt, to be willing to throw the old rules out the window for a new set which fits the digital realm.
I'm not sure that the sentiments presented here aren't self-contradictory. You say that the net won't hurt corporate profits, but also state that companies must abandon their old business models (on which those profits are based). The plain fact is that the net will hurt overall profits because those profits are based on scarcity of physical resources and that scarcity isn't present on the net.
The real issue is that companies can see the potential for their existing business model to be destroyed by the new reality of the net, and they're trying to fight that. The DMCA and similar acts are nothing less than an attempt by business to legislate that the old rules of economics will continue to apply on the net.
I don't doubt that this effort is doomed to fail in the long run. It's fundamentally an attempt to screw customers. In the long run screwing customers is bad business practice, and companies that don't try to do so (by adopting the new economics of the net) will wind up winning the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of customers. The problem is that it's going to be a long, bloody, drawn out fight. The estblished businesses have too much clout and money to go down without a fight.
The article comments that big companies should have enough leverage to negotiate non-UCITA contracts if they don't like UCITA's provisions. A very interesting quote from one software purchaser gives the lie to that statement:
"Microsoft basically owns our desktops. We have no clout with Microsoft," said Roth. With other vendors, once their software becomes part of a mission-critical system, the vendor knows it. "I don't have a choice of saying, 'No, I don't want your product anymore.' I'm in tight with them. I have to have it," said Roth.
IOW, software companies naturally have a dominant negotiating position with corporate customers because of migration costs. If that's really true, why do companies need UCITA? You've got me.
Of course this is exactly the argument that ESR uses to show that businesses need free/open source software. If you get mission critical software from a sole source vendor, they already have your balls in a vise. All UCITA does is to make that a bit more explicit.
Once the genie is out of the bottle, hasn't the dsamage already been done? What's to prevent the marketing institutions to continue using data they have already gined, and in turn, pass that through to other, potentially larger data-mining companies?
I don't think that there's a legal issue that prevents them from doing so, but there's certainly a practical problem. They key think that makes the data held by the credit reporting agencies so nice to businesses is that it's current. Once that data gets stale it loses a lot of its value.
A good example of this is one of the uses described in the article; trying to get customers for furhter financial services. One of the companies looked for people with multiple mortgages who had poor credit, and tried to get them to refinance (presumably at high rates). If the data on their existing mortgages were a year old, this would be much less attractive. There would be no way of knowing if the people had refinanced in the interim, had suffered additional credit problems, or had any other changes in financial status that might make the offer pointless or bad business.
anyway, I'm puzzling over the fact that the company states that it will cost US$12 500 to issue new logins and passwords? WTF? Depending on the size of the company, it's going to be an administrative bitch, but it's nothing terribly difficult and is basically a time is money issue.
It depends on how paranoid you're being. I don't think that I'd trust my system after someone had thoroughly cracked my usernames and passwords. They could have installed all kinds of trojans and backdoors, so you're really going to have to do a much more thorough re-securing than just issuing new UIDs and passwords. At a minimum I'd want to do a thorough security audit, and possibly even tear the systems down and re-install from ground zero just in case. Start doing that on many systems and you're talking about real effort and cost.
These people are not primarily being charged for having L0phtCrack. They're being charged with stealing a lot of sensitive information from former employers, and L0phtCrack is one of the tools that they used to break into others' accounts to get that information.
One interesting quote from the article, though:
When Bell was employed at Epicor, he had used the LOphtCrack program to extract all of the employee user IDs and passwords, and then stored them on his home computer. Epicor officials considered the list of user IDs and passwords to be very confidential information which they had taken significant security measures to protect.
The company may have considered the passwords very confidential, and they may have tried to keep them secret, but they apparently didn't do a very good job of it. Their security measures may have been significant, but they weren't particularly effective. Running some standard security checking programs (not to mention requiring hard-to-crack passwords) probably would have helped a lot in preventing this.
WEb serving is fairly light on processors - its heavy on network connectivity and disk I/O, with an emphasis of 100% uptime. With these requirements, it doesn't make sense to use mainframes, and I don't think anyone would reasonably advocate using them in this capacity.
Assuming that the premise is correct (i.e. that web serving is processor light and IO and reliability heavy) the conclusion is 100% backward. Mainframes aren't built primarily for heavy computation. They're built for heavy IO and absolute reliability. PC's, OTOH, are much more heavily optimized for numerical power with comparatively poor IO and (hardware) reliability. This suggests that mainframes are the optimal choice for web service.
...as bad advertising. Having read abvout what a nasty and insidious thing this company did, I went to their web site to see what they do. Before I hadn't heard of them. I'd be surprised if they didn't get a few more customers from this.
Sad, but true. Pretty much the same thing happened to me with the decision about the ditto search engine. I had never heard of the company until someone sued them, but when I went to their site to see what the fuss was about it turned out that they were pretty cool. Now I know were to go if I want to search for jpegs on the net- and it's all because someone sued them and tried to run them out of business.
Maybe some people will hesitate to start using a product like StarOffice, because they'll think it might be worth it to wait for Office/Linux. Indeed, this posture might end making them hesitate to use Linux at all. It would hurt Sun, too.
Maybe they're trying to butter up Linux' reputation as a formidable competitor, to influence the courts' decisions in the anti-trust suit.
Maybe they want to gauge public reaction to such a project. If it's positive, then they might really will give it a whirl.
These motives would seem sensible if Microsoft were openly discussing the idea of Office for Linux, but they're not. Instead, we're getting rumors. You don't go out and create vaporware, talk up a competitor, or gauge public reaction by quietly hiring a group of developers to work on a product. If you're going to do one of those things, you get the formidable Microsoft PR organization to talk about your upcoming Office for Linux port, or at least leak corporate memos about looking into applications for Linux. When they were talking about Media Player for Linux, they actually had a Microsoft manager get up and say that they were looking into it. This smells more like a feasibility study, possibly even a pilot project to see how easy it is to port existing applications to Open Source Operating Systems.
Anyone have any idea WHY microsoft would want to do this? I shouldn't even be replying to rumor stories, I guess I'm just bored at work...
Two words: Contingency Planning. Microsoft may be fighting tooth and nail to avoid being broken up by DOJ, but any reasonably intelligent person has to consider it as a possibility. If the company does get broken up, the new applications company will no longer have their old motivation not to make applications for non Windows OSes that are "too good". They'll also still have DOJ looking over their shoulder to make sure that they aren't colluding under the table. An early release of Office for Linux would certainly help both profitability and proving their good faith.
The Microsoft Board of Directors would be derelict in their duties to their stockholders if they weren't making plans in case of a breakup. Nobody should be at all surprised if they hear reliable indications that MS applications people are looking at other OSes and OS people are looking at better supporting outside applications. It's just sound business practice to plan for an unpleasant possibility.
One thing that deeply bothers me about this report is that it seems to focus primarily on purely economic problems associated with Echelon. The EU ministers seem to be worried that their businesses are going to lose market share because NSA is passing their plans on to their American competitors. This seems both dangerous and hypocritical to me. It's dangerous because they seem to be downplaying or ignoring the (IMO) much more significant damage to personal privacy that is inherent in the NSA's pawing through everyone's communications.
It's hypocritical because EU countries have been as vigorous as anyone in using government intelligence to benefit their commercial sector. Interestingly, two of the specific examples of intelligence alleged to have come from Echelon were about EU companies offering bribes in pursuit of contracts. I don't want to compare the significance of offering bribes to that of reading people's mail, but it find it pretty hypocritical of the EU to bitch about others' reading of their mail turning up illegal and immoral behavior.
I hope this doesn't sound like a flame, but I strongly suggest that anyone who hasn't been formally trained in typing get lessons before trying anything else. It's a lot like programming; you can teach yourself a lot, but when you really want to know how the pros do it, it's best to go to the pros for help. Clerical and secretarial workers have been typing for over 100 years, and as a group they've gathered a lot of experience about the right way to type, and I highly recommend tapping that knowledge. You'll probably come out typing faster, and you'll almost certainly come out with better typing habits for preventing RSI. I took a typing class in JHS, and I've probably used the skills I picked up there more than anything else in my primary education.
More important than that the suit is taking place is that the lower court has already ruled that storing and displaying part of an indexed site constituted protected fair use. Others on slashdot have pointed out that this is a potentially contentious issue. Some sites, like Google actually keep a copy of each page as it existed when they referenced it. The lower court ruling protects that practices as fair use copying. The LA Times article suggests that the ruling is likely to be upheld- a big win for free speech on the net.
The thing that Wall &gang seem to miss is the distinct registers of natural language. The whole thing is very rich in expressivity, and highly non-orthogonal. But that is absolutely *NOT* the case when it comes to specialized areas of natural language where clarity and precision are at a premium. I *WANT* air-traffic controllers to speak in a highly structured, syntactically and lexically limited, and stereotypical fashion! I really *DO NOT* want them to use free verse! To a somewhat lesser extent, I also want programming specs or technical documentation to follow a rather rigid pattern. When I look in the help file, it makes my life a lot easier if the list of parameters to a function are always described under the same heading, with a consistent and fairly small subset of English words, and with an attention to consistent whitespace, layout and special characters.
This seems to do a pretty good job of summarizing the philosophical differences between Perl and Python, but I think that the writer makes but ignores an important point. It's true that you want to incorporate structure into some forms of communication and programming, but that doesn't prevent the use of a natural language. After all the air-traffic controlers he mentions are still speaking English- they're just using a controlled syntatic and semantic subset of English. The same thing is true of Perl; if you want to do something rigidly structured, you can limit yourself to a subset of the available semantics and syntax and produce a rigidly structured program.
The converse is not true, though. If you start out with a language with rigidly structured syntax and limited vocabulary, you will have a hard time expressing yourself freely.
The moral is that Perl is a great language for *implementing* haiku... but Python is rather better at implementing functional specs.
And this is a great example of the point. A haiku is nothing if not rigidly structured, but it's quite possible to express both haiku and air-traffic controls using English. A language designed specifically for one or the other, though will never be able to do both.
is some sort of open hardware storage standard, NOT linked to movies/music/copyrighted-stuff. It seems that all of these problems and delays in high-capacity removable media are caused by copyright problems, as the entertainment monopolists try to keep their monopoly profits.
There's just one problem with this; the media industry would still fight it tooth and nail. They're smart enough to recognize that data is data, and you can cram a movie onto a 10 GB non-DVD optical removable medium as easily as a 9.4 GB two layer DVD. And they have considerable means at their disposal to make life unpleasant for anyone who tries to break their hold.
For one very big thing, studios are already very tightly linked with a number of the biggest electronics manufacturers (i.e. Sony and Phillips), so that takes a number of possible players out right away. Second, they have considerable patent strength, which is going to make engineering something that doesn't infringe quite difficult.
Third, they have close enough to monopoly control in existing media (and big enough bank accounts) to try crushing any attempt to break their stranglehold. They have the motivation, too, because they're not just facing the loss of their electronics sales but also pre-recorded media. They would probably be willing to sell their crippled recording technology at a loss for quite a while to forestall that, particularly because it's going to make the next company that tries to break into the market very wary.
It's fairly clear that selling a domain name can be ethical under at least some circumstances. If, for instance, a richer company comes along and offers you money for a domain name that you are actually using, it's clearly OK to sell it. OTOH, I don't think that it's ethical to keep around a domain name that you're not really interested in using in the hopes that someone will offer buy it. If you're not actually going to use it for something, you should let your rights lapse.
The real problem here, IMO, is that there are conflicting ethical situations. On the one hand, you have an ethical obligation to treat other net users correctly by allowing the rights to lapse. On the other hand, you have an ethical obligation to the investors in your business to maximize the return on their investment, which suggests that you should sell it. I think, though, that the ordinary ethical obligation has to trump the business obligation. AFAIK, business ethics says that you have to do everything to help your business so long as it is otherwise ethical. This is something like the counter to the "carrying out orders" defense of illegal actions by the military; ones obligation to follow orders never superceeds the requirement to follow the law.
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Actually, some of the data was one-way hashed in a way that made it impossible to uniquely decrypt, as you would know if you had read the original analysis. The list consisted of a list of sites, some of which were blocked completely, and some of which had only some subdirectories blocked. The subdirectory blocks were handled by hashing the subdirectory names and storing the hashes. This both made the list more compact (no more than 32 bits were needed for any subdirectory, no matter how long its name) and made perfect decryption impossible. In fact, the authors pointed out that it was necessary to do a dictionary-type attack on the subdirectory list in order to find out what directories were actually blocked.
Far more interesting than the file on Einstein or Mickey Mantle, IMO, is that they've got a bunch of stuff on cattle mutilation, Project Blue Book, and related X-Files type stuff. Maybe the truth really is out there.
Actually, one of the very nice things about this is that changes in the license this way work like a ratchet; they can make things more favorable for the licensee but never less favorable.
Suppose, for instance, that I license my software under GLP 2.0 or later. A few years down the road, RMS sells his soul to Satan and releases GPL 6.6.6 that requires you to send your firstborn to FSF in order to use any software licensed under it. Users of my program are still perfectly fine, though, because they retain the right to license under a version between 2.0 and 6.6.6. OTOH, if the courts find some flaw in 2.0 that prevents licesees from doing something that they want to do, they can still use the hypothetical 3.0 that repairs the hole that the court found.
Of course, this isn't actually limited to the GPL. The Perl license, for instance, lets you license under either GLP or Artistic License- and you don't actually have to choose or tell anyone which one you're licensing under.
I work for a non-profit, and I can assure you that one of the wisest things I've heard is, "Just because the company doesn't make a profit doesn't mean that nobody does." Not having to make a profit just means that the people in charge can keep money above breakeven rather than having to dole it out to shareholders. There are dozens of ways of doing this that are perfectly legal.
Of course, there's a classic Dilbert strip on this topic. The dialog goes something like:
TrustE sounds a little bit better than that (they do have some minimal requirements about their policies, apparently), but not much. It sounds, for instance, as though TrustE thinks that it's perfectly OK for a company to promise not to sell your personal information, then change its policy without notification and sell it if you come back to visit its site- even if you don't stay around for long enough to read the revised privacy policy.
One resource I'd strongly recommend is the National Center for Biotechnology Information. I'm a professional working in the field of Proteomics (the protein equivalent of Genomics) and NCBI is an outstanding clearinghouse of information. It also has good links to other sites. If you really want to see some of the science that's going on using genomic information (and are willing to put up with a somewhat dry, utilitarian attitude), it's a good place to look.
In a word, no. They've already known a lot about visible outbreak channels just based on photographic evidence, but these are actually buried. The were found by doing tricks with gravitometers and the like. The Mars stuff at JPL is definitely worth looking at. The high resolution topographic maps from MOLA are particularly interesting- especially while reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.
I'd advice against the T-shirt. It will make you look like a far out wacko, rather than an ordinary concerned citizen. Politicians are much more receptive to concerns of the mainstream than far out elements; after all, many more voters are in the mainstream than the fringes.
It would probably also pay to spend a bit of effort researching the guy you're going to talk to. If you know what his personal hot buttons are, you're much more likely to be able to find some angle on the issue that's really convincing to him. I know that it sounds awfully cynical, but everyone draws their conclusions differently, and you need to know what kind of argument is likely to convince your target.
I don't dispute that it will be possible to make money in the new economy, nor that some people can become very wealthy in the process. The point is that an economy of abundance is almost certainly going to be less profitable than an economy of scarcity (from a producer standpoint at least) because people have a limited ability to consume. That's what produces the abundance in the first place; people can get their hands on more stuff than they can consume. That inherently means, though, that it's a buyers' market because supply outstrips demand, and buyers' markets drive down profitability.
Now there are certainly are places in this system to make money. One, as someone has pointed out, is by providing information and services to people who are overwhelmed with choices. Another is to produce something with value added that can't be kept effectively by copying- like very time-sensitive information. The most obvious, of course, is to produce the physical goods that make the digital abundance possible- routers, fiber optics, digital recording media, home music studios, etc.
The counterargument, though, is that copyright and IP rights in general are not natural rights in the same way that other property rights are. They are created rights that were invented by society to benefit the public by encouraging creativity. Thus the government is only obligated to protect those rights to the extent that it is generally beneficial. If the web is structured so that it is more beneficial that IP have less protection, then that's the way that it ought to be.
I'm not sure that the sentiments presented here aren't self-contradictory. You say that the net won't hurt corporate profits, but also state that companies must abandon their old business models (on which those profits are based). The plain fact is that the net will hurt overall profits because those profits are based on scarcity of physical resources and that scarcity isn't present on the net.
The real issue is that companies can see the potential for their existing business model to be destroyed by the new reality of the net, and they're trying to fight that. The DMCA and similar acts are nothing less than an attempt by business to legislate that the old rules of economics will continue to apply on the net.
I don't doubt that this effort is doomed to fail in the long run. It's fundamentally an attempt to screw customers. In the long run screwing customers is bad business practice, and companies that don't try to do so (by adopting the new economics of the net) will wind up winning the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of customers. The problem is that it's going to be a long, bloody, drawn out fight. The estblished businesses have too much clout and money to go down without a fight.
The article comments that big companies should have enough leverage to negotiate non-UCITA contracts if they don't like UCITA's provisions. A very interesting quote from one software purchaser gives the lie to that statement:
IOW, software companies naturally have a dominant negotiating position with corporate customers because of migration costs. If that's really true, why do companies need UCITA? You've got me.
Of course this is exactly the argument that ESR uses to show that businesses need free/open source software. If you get mission critical software from a sole source vendor, they already have your balls in a vise. All UCITA does is to make that a bit more explicit.
I don't think that there's a legal issue that prevents them from doing so, but there's certainly a practical problem. They key think that makes the data held by the credit reporting agencies so nice to businesses is that it's current. Once that data gets stale it loses a lot of its value.
A good example of this is one of the uses described in the article; trying to get customers for furhter financial services. One of the companies looked for people with multiple mortgages who had poor credit, and tried to get them to refinance (presumably at high rates). If the data on their existing mortgages were a year old, this would be much less attractive. There would be no way of knowing if the people had refinanced in the interim, had suffered additional credit problems, or had any other changes in financial status that might make the offer pointless or bad business.
It depends on how paranoid you're being. I don't think that I'd trust my system after someone had thoroughly cracked my usernames and passwords. They could have installed all kinds of trojans and backdoors, so you're really going to have to do a much more thorough re-securing than just issuing new UIDs and passwords. At a minimum I'd want to do a thorough security audit, and possibly even tear the systems down and re-install from ground zero just in case. Start doing that on many systems and you're talking about real effort and cost.
These people are not primarily being charged for having L0phtCrack. They're being charged with stealing a lot of sensitive information from former employers, and L0phtCrack is one of the tools that they used to break into others' accounts to get that information.
One interesting quote from the article, though:
The company may have considered the passwords very confidential, and they may have tried to keep them secret, but they apparently didn't do a very good job of it. Their security measures may have been significant, but they weren't particularly effective. Running some standard security checking programs (not to mention requiring hard-to-crack passwords) probably would have helped a lot in preventing this.
Assuming that the premise is correct (i.e. that web serving is processor light and IO and reliability heavy) the conclusion is 100% backward. Mainframes aren't built primarily for heavy computation. They're built for heavy IO and absolute reliability. PC's, OTOH, are much more heavily optimized for numerical power with comparatively poor IO and (hardware) reliability. This suggests that mainframes are the optimal choice for web service.
Sad, but true. Pretty much the same thing happened to me with the decision about the ditto search engine. I had never heard of the company until someone sued them, but when I went to their site to see what the fuss was about it turned out that they were pretty cool. Now I know were to go if I want to search for jpegs on the net- and it's all because someone sued them and tried to run them out of business.
These motives would seem sensible if Microsoft were openly discussing the idea of Office for Linux, but they're not. Instead, we're getting rumors. You don't go out and create vaporware, talk up a competitor, or gauge public reaction by quietly hiring a group of developers to work on a product. If you're going to do one of those things, you get the formidable Microsoft PR organization to talk about your upcoming Office for Linux port, or at least leak corporate memos about looking into applications for Linux. When they were talking about Media Player for Linux, they actually had a Microsoft manager get up and say that they were looking into it. This smells more like a feasibility study, possibly even a pilot project to see how easy it is to port existing applications to Open Source Operating Systems.
Two words: Contingency Planning. Microsoft may be fighting tooth and nail to avoid being broken up by DOJ, but any reasonably intelligent person has to consider it as a possibility. If the company does get broken up, the new applications company will no longer have their old motivation not to make applications for non Windows OSes that are "too good". They'll also still have DOJ looking over their shoulder to make sure that they aren't colluding under the table. An early release of Office for Linux would certainly help both profitability and proving their good faith.
The Microsoft Board of Directors would be derelict in their duties to their stockholders if they weren't making plans in case of a breakup. Nobody should be at all surprised if they hear reliable indications that MS applications people are looking at other OSes and OS people are looking at better supporting outside applications. It's just sound business practice to plan for an unpleasant possibility.
One thing that deeply bothers me about this report is that it seems to focus primarily on purely economic problems associated with Echelon. The EU ministers seem to be worried that their businesses are going to lose market share because NSA is passing their plans on to their American competitors. This seems both dangerous and hypocritical to me. It's dangerous because they seem to be downplaying or ignoring the (IMO) much more significant damage to personal privacy that is inherent in the NSA's pawing through everyone's communications.
It's hypocritical because EU countries have been as vigorous as anyone in using government intelligence to benefit their commercial sector. Interestingly, two of the specific examples of intelligence alleged to have come from Echelon were about EU companies offering bribes in pursuit of contracts. I don't want to compare the significance of offering bribes to that of reading people's mail, but it find it pretty hypocritical of the EU to bitch about others' reading of their mail turning up illegal and immoral behavior.
I hope this doesn't sound like a flame, but I strongly suggest that anyone who hasn't been formally trained in typing get lessons before trying anything else. It's a lot like programming; you can teach yourself a lot, but when you really want to know how the pros do it, it's best to go to the pros for help. Clerical and secretarial workers have been typing for over 100 years, and as a group they've gathered a lot of experience about the right way to type, and I highly recommend tapping that knowledge. You'll probably come out typing faster, and you'll almost certainly come out with better typing habits for preventing RSI. I took a typing class in JHS, and I've probably used the skills I picked up there more than anything else in my primary education.
More important than that the suit is taking place is that the lower court has already ruled that storing and displaying part of an indexed site constituted protected fair use. Others on slashdot have pointed out that this is a potentially contentious issue. Some sites, like Google actually keep a copy of each page as it existed when they referenced it. The lower court ruling protects that practices as fair use copying. The LA Times article suggests that the ruling is likely to be upheld- a big win for free speech on the net.
This seems to do a pretty good job of summarizing the philosophical differences between Perl and Python, but I think that the writer makes but ignores an important point. It's true that you want to incorporate structure into some forms of communication and programming, but that doesn't prevent the use of a natural language. After all the air-traffic controlers he mentions are still speaking English- they're just using a controlled syntatic and semantic subset of English. The same thing is true of Perl; if you want to do something rigidly structured, you can limit yourself to a subset of the available semantics and syntax and produce a rigidly structured program.
The converse is not true, though. If you start out with a language with rigidly structured syntax and limited vocabulary, you will have a hard time expressing yourself freely.
And this is a great example of the point. A haiku is nothing if not rigidly structured, but it's quite possible to express both haiku and air-traffic controls using English. A language designed specifically for one or the other, though will never be able to do both.
There's just one problem with this; the media industry would still fight it tooth and nail. They're smart enough to recognize that data is data, and you can cram a movie onto a 10 GB non-DVD optical removable medium as easily as a 9.4 GB two layer DVD. And they have considerable means at their disposal to make life unpleasant for anyone who tries to break their hold.
For one very big thing, studios are already very tightly linked with a number of the biggest electronics manufacturers (i.e. Sony and Phillips), so that takes a number of possible players out right away. Second, they have considerable patent strength, which is going to make engineering something that doesn't infringe quite difficult.
Third, they have close enough to monopoly control in existing media (and big enough bank accounts) to try crushing any attempt to break their stranglehold. They have the motivation, too, because they're not just facing the loss of their electronics sales but also pre-recorded media. They would probably be willing to sell their crippled recording technology at a loss for quite a while to forestall that, particularly because it's going to make the next company that tries to break into the market very wary.
It's fairly clear that selling a domain name can be ethical under at least some circumstances. If, for instance, a richer company comes along and offers you money for a domain name that you are actually using, it's clearly OK to sell it. OTOH, I don't think that it's ethical to keep around a domain name that you're not really interested in using in the hopes that someone will offer buy it. If you're not actually going to use it for something, you should let your rights lapse.
The real problem here, IMO, is that there are conflicting ethical situations. On the one hand, you have an ethical obligation to treat other net users correctly by allowing the rights to lapse. On the other hand, you have an ethical obligation to the investors in your business to maximize the return on their investment, which suggests that you should sell it. I think, though, that the ordinary ethical obligation has to trump the business obligation. AFAIK, business ethics says that you have to do everything to help your business so long as it is otherwise ethical. This is something like the counter to the "carrying out orders" defense of illegal actions by the military; ones obligation to follow orders never superceeds the requirement to follow the law.