But what does blathering on about nothing gains the shill?
Typically two things; 1) we discuss something irrelevant but which forwards the shills interests 2) we don't discuss the main thing.
The main thing is:
Microsoft sued Barnes and Noble about patents; The lawsuit ended up being settled by Microsoft paying out 300Million cash!!!
This has the same stucture as the Apple monopoly payout which allowed Apple to survive it's down years. Take away from this:
If sued by Microsoft, fight to the death; there are some skeletons somewhere they will pay anything to hide
Samsung and HTC management should be fired for failing to fight
Microsoft has no patents worthy of mention; the worst that can happen if they sue is that you become rich beyond your wildest dreams
No, its pointed out that Apple must love F/OSS because they contribute to so much of it.
No, actually, looking at the old discussions, for example the only references to Apple I can find are to their use of open source. You may be right that their contributions should be discussed more, but that's not what happens.
Interestingly enough; it seems to me that this is exactly the situation where the GPL shines through. You want contributions to your project? Put it under the GPL and accept contributions which are under the GPL. Then everybody knows you aren't planning to cheat them. You want to choose a project and contribut to it? Choose one under the GPL; then you know that your contributions and the fixes people make to them will come back to you.
At one time, free software advocates made a big deal out of what they called "Freedom Zero" - the right to run software however one pleases. They hated restrictions and EULAs and developers who made moral judgements
. Users like Apple were using the software the "wrong way" by not contributing to FSF community ecosystem, danceline, and parade floats. So they rewrote the license to restrict Freedom Zero rights... now you can't run software unless I can run it too.
That is fine, but Apple is perfectly within their rights to stick with GPL2, which protects their Freedom Zero rights as originally outlined by RMS.
I think this response to my post really bears reading. It's quite cool and really backs up my point). There's a whole load of random strange vitriol being thrown about. More or less in the "throw enough mud and some of it is bound to stick" frame of mind. Let's just look at how wierd this post is.
The poster says:
As time went on, FSF decided they didn't like Freedom Zero anymore
then later
now you can't run software unless I can run it too.
the GPLv3 actually contains (in section 2. Basic Permissions.) this explicit clause:
This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program
This is after making it clear that since it's a copyright licence it has nothing to do with your usage; only your distribution of the software. You can't get a more explicit affirmation of freedom zero than that. Why pretend otherwise? Someone is afraid you will protect your software and your users with the GPLv3. Why are they afraid of that? The logical explanation seems to me that they want to screw you and are afraid the GPLv3 will stop them. Let's look at some more of the post:
That is fine, but Apple is perfectly within their rights to stick with GPL2, which protects their Freedom Zero rights as originally outlined by RMS.
This is a reply to a post which advocated the GPL without reference to version. Where nobody ever suggested apple shouldn't use the GPLv2 if they want to. It seems like a simple non-sequiteur, yet it isn't. This is dead simple. In setting out to destroy your freedom and their chance of competition, Microsoft and Apple want to reduce the GPL as much as possible since it is the likely source of that competition. The GPLv3 represents a more effective GPL. FUD must be spread to stop it.
Fundamental take home: when someone is lying this hard to try to get you to stop doing something, it's time to start thinking if you shouldn't be doing exactly what they tell you not to do.. I'm personally becoming convinced that the GPLv3 should really be a priority for everybody who cares about the freedom to program as they want.
This is the fifth story[1] based on a single article by one single shill. If this were mere trolling, I'd be grudgingly impressed. As this is a commercial scheme, I hate the guy with passion.
[1]. counting only those I noticed and remember, so there's probably more.
100% true. The way this keeps coming up is a very clear message. That message is:
Microsoft and Apple hate the GPL because it represents a chance to break their duopoly on personal computing by creating a complete independent environment.
Whenever we have this discussion it gets pointed out repeatedly that Apple must love F/OSS because they use so much of it. What doesn't get pointed out is that the OpenDarwin project to build a system based on Apple's open source failed for lack of cooperaton from Apple and lack of involvement from their developers. This is symptomatic of Apple's attitude; they will take whatever you give them. They will even co-operate wherever they see clear profit. They will never support things which give their users freedom to work in ways that Apple doesn't approve of. Microsoft's hatred of the GPL is so well documented in their own words that nobody even tries to claim otherwise, except for a few "Microsoft has changed" voices that we have been hearing for years without seeing anything actually changing. Note, however, that Microsoft has quite happily used BSD software all over their system.
Microsoft and Apple don't mind F/OSS as long as it is a box and they can charge you for the use of the box and limit what goes in and out of it. They fear GPL based open source as something which might allow you to create your own box and choose what you want to allow in and out of there. They are doing that by making sure that whatever you do with a computer you have to go through one of their systems. They are aiming to head back to the bad days of the 1980s when you didn't just pay for your compiler software; you actually paid run time licenses for the libraries you used. This is what app stores and their percentage taxes are about. This is what the GPL threatens by giving every computer programmer the chance to contribute to and modify the code.
These stories keep coming up because the various PR shills here want to make people behave differently from their own interests. Remember that and choose the GPL whenever you have the option.
When you first listen to the "the GPL is declining because it's users sue too much" that sort of seems like a reasonable argument for people who are afraid of lawsuits and can't afford the lawyers to understand the licenses.
Then you think about it. The person who is choosing the license is the author of the software. By a strange coincidence, that's also the person who gets to decide whether to sue or not. There is nothing in the GPL which could ever force them to start a lawsuit. The most it can ever do is give them the choice to do so, and even then, only in the situation where someone is cheating on their open source quid pro quo.
Seems to me that this argument is being spread about by the proprietary software houses who want to sucker programmers into allowing them to build private versions without having to pay anything or contribute anything back to the community. Just remember; if there turns out to be a good reason to do so, you can always relicense your GPL code with no protectuion under something like the X11 license. Going the other way is much more risky and difficult.
To quote the actual article; which even the Microsoft trolls should have had a chance to study in advance
And we hear the profits are very strong in the Samsung handsets unit, so this is done with a healthy business, won fair and square, not in slashing prices and buying market share. Excellent job Samsung, excellent
I think you will find plenty more evidence that Samsung's profit isn't too bad. Having the dominant position in Mobile phones in terms of numbers also tended to lead to very high long term margins. It will be interesting to see how that plays out when there seem to be two stable positions in the market (Apple and Samsung). Although others seem to think one or the other will dominate, I don't think so. The mobile operator's like this situation with real competition and know that Microsoft is out to kill their business so they will probably end up keeping it.
thanks to the microshit idiot in charge, nokia will fail and microshit will pick up the remains for pennies on the dollar.
That would be a repeat of Microsoft's Sendo strategy and would make sense. Sendo seems to have ended in court with a loss / really expensive settlement though; I'm just wondering how Eliop got a worse deal than that past the Nokia board and lawyers though?
The developers for Open Office mostly come from Oracle. However, most of the team was fired or had quit so now that's a much smaller group than the ones working on Libre Office. Also, given Oracle's recent record of attacks on former Sun open source even when it had a supposedly independent "community process" it doesn't seem like a safe bet to most people. It's embarrassing that the Apache foundation got involved in such an obvious act of vandalism.
When crap like this is pulled there needs to be a demerit system that now weighs more heavily against the side which was found to behaving unethically.
There isn't a point system. However, there's a much more simple thing, and it's actually the law already. Products from companies involved in corruption should be excluded from all governmental contracts for a period of time as happened for example to Boeing in the USA. If Microsoft products were suspended for e.g. 10 years, this would be a salutory lesson for all involved in corruption.
Answer a) is whatevery way they want. b) is; if need be by calling the guy back on his phone number; If they are suspicious enough, by having him come into the office and sign it personally whilst being compared against a photo. By requiring him to use a hardware token. Whatever.
What my bank does is sends out an SMS which contains the sum of the transaction; the person it's being paid to and, at the end, an authorization code. As long as my phone isn't hacked they can be pretty sure that I actually authorized the transaction.
if everything is authenticated correctly?
The things were not authenticated correctly. A transaction which the guy didn't want was put through. The authentication system was inadequate for the job and there are very good reasons why people use more sophisticated ones nowadays.
What's most important is that it's the bank which chooses the authentication system. The customer cannot decide that they want to use a different one. Even changing banks often won't help. Because of this, the banks should always take the loss unless the customer acts in a clearly and openly negligent / fraudulent way. If the losses become too big then they can choose to change. If they are acceptable then they can choose a cheaper authentication system. In this case went for the cheaper system rather than a smar card/ certificate based one which would have protected the guy against his own mistake. That decision probably saved them millions of Euros; they can afford to pay out in this particular case.
Is a bank also responsible for your losses if a guy comes to your front door, poses as a bank clerk and you cut him a cheque?
This depends. If the bank provides a service where they come to your door and there was no reasonable, easy way for you to tell this wasn't a person from that service without using specialist knowledge, then yes. If, on the other hand they don't provide such a service or they make sure that you can easily identify the service, then maybe not. They would have to do something like not carrying out the transactions you asked for if you didn't specfically verithfy the clerk via a phone call so that you learn that you have to do that every time.
There are limits, but the primary responsibility should be on the banks side and they should always have to proove that the customer did something fraudulent or negligent to avoid that.
Ok, so taking in what you posted still does not get them out of hot water, and still keeps me in hot water. Just because I was lax in not getting a license before I stored mp3's n such that does not excuse google from not having a license for files on their service.
Luckily for you that's not mentioned in the article;-) However, in this case, provided that they follow procedures which Google already has in place due to all it's other services, they are covered by the DMCA and similar legislation. All they have to do is to remove the content when the content owner notifies them that it's copied without a license and you fail to give a counter notice. There are very few jurisdictions nowadays where an online service is liable for the misbehaviour of their users provided that they react to notification of it.
I really like the way that two posters, including an AC have managed to provide the fully correct design for this within ten minutes of the original design improvement proposal whilst, at the same time, the embedded device manufacturers can't get it right after decades of trying. The main positive take away is that the human race is doomed and will be replaced by more intelligent cockroaches.
[..] google would also be liable since they then claim license over the files I uploaded.
If you had read the fine article and followed the links (don't reply "you must be new here"; I am the RTFA troll; you will have been trolled) then you would have noticed this term:
Make sure that you have the necessary rights to grant us this licence for any content you submit to our Services.
Do you think Google's lawyers were born yesterday? You will come into the court room strictly on your own. Google's largest likely involvement will be to twist the knife the (MP/RI)AA sticks into you.
Because their standard license (which is what this is) also covers youtube, etc.
If Google goes bankrupt, then this license may end up being the only thing protecting your data. I don't think that they are doing this maliciously and I do think that if enough people protest that will fix it, but I don't think it should just be dismissed by saying "oh; they promised not to be evil". If you think Google can't go bankrupt, please remember that five years ago Microsoft also looked completely invulnerable. Almost nobody could imagine them not being dominant in personal computing. Things like iOS and Android turn up and suddenly they look like DEC dealing with the arrival of the Microprocessor. In ten years time the same could easily happen to Google.
The "ray of sanity" is allowing the user to decide.
Flash is; together with Java (applets; server side Java is fine); the current big cause of security holes and both set out to be things that nobody could avoid having. These are two archaic, proprietary nightmares which, together with H.264, were disrupting the chance to have a standardised free web. Destroying Flash, which is taking.NET with it, is about the best thing Apple has done in the last ten years.
If Google only has the guts to completely kill off the companies using H.264 then we will see something really good and a real proof of the value of competition in the computing industry. I have been just blown away by the fact that, for the first time in a number of years, I am completely happy running a computer without any Flash install at all.
Not only that, but his publication mentions ZERO (0) references: he cites noone!
Not only accused of wreckless driving, he is doing some pretty wreckless sciencing too!
I think that as long as we are sure he will remain wreckless then we really have no justification for charging him for reckless driving. In fact, given the way that anti-scientific elements are wrecking our education system then we wouldn't be considered reckless for encouraging him to go on as he reckoning on doing.
The documentation tries to document what your intentions are, just like the code tries to implement them.
The code can fail to do its job, and of course the documentation can too!
This is 4/insightful? On the scale of today's article that's probably right too but if you look at the history of this stuff it should be 1/redundant. We seem to be continually rediscovering the computer science of the 60s. I mean, how can we be discussing this without even mentioning literate programming a 1970s answer to the problems which you get when you start to use documentation for code maintenance?
I mean, some poor guy writes a blog spreading wisdom to himself and his five friends who are just discovering about how to lead programming teams (there's nothing wrong with that; one of his friends should just point him to some of the literate programming discussions and some of the rants of Linus Torvalds against over-documentation, for example). What's wrong is when it gets plastered on the front of Slashdot and we take it seriously.
What's next? Rediscovering that it's a good idea to test things in a separate environment before deploying them in the real world?
And then used an "entirely voluntary" d-notice to ensure that the newspaper's reported the CSI story as part of their campaign to show that forensic science services are just fine. To be honest, when you look at the stupidities of the UK system there's no logical way that the people in the UK can be more free than people living in the US, yet they are.
Maybe the teachers are the problem, and the kids should be given the OLPCs without any interference...
If you ask me; this attitude may be part of what's holding OLPC back. Mitra's experiment shows that there are kids out there that can teach themselves. Lots more that can teach themselves with a little start from others. It says nothing about the kids that never even tried to use the computer. Some kids, if left on their own will teach themselves. Many many kids will not. Plenty of people will go a long way if you give them a little starting push to help them along. These people will be voting on your future and have to understand issues like computerised voting and privacy laws if we are to get sensible government.
I think many of the people on this site, being IT/computing/technology people in work now, will have taught themselves most of what they know. There just wasn't anything around to teach us what we needed when we needed it. We then tend to undervalue even the stuff that was taught to us. Even more, we tend to be the people who were held back by the teachers and forget that there were others that were different.
You need to provide both good teaching and opportunity for kids to self develop. Miss either one of them and you will cause damage.
Perhaps the laptops should be issued to all students who do all their homework and appear to be giving school a go. Don't have to be good, but should try and be rewarded for it.
Both you and the grandparent are completely missing the point. The world has changed and Reading wRiting and aRithmetic are no longer sufficient. Every single person needs to properly understand computation and computers otherwise they will never understand the world around them and will believe in Voodoo like voting machines and terrorist profiling. If you only give the bright kids computers they will be stigmatised as different and the others will fall behind. Even normal things, like writing a letter, have completely changed and are becoming as valuable as Latin*. Normal jobs for normal people are now advertised on Facebook and for most people's lives; definitely those that are educated today, writing a social network posting may be a more important skill that normal writing. That's a really scary world for people who have only a traditional education and haven't made the shift to computing.
Something has to be done. Previous attempts with standard computers have failed with either the students simply playing games (given Windows computers at home) or with Teachers simply repeating old subjects on a computer and without getting much learning benefit at all. OLPC may be misguided, but it isn't misguided in the way it's primitivist critics seem to think; it has at least attempted to identify and address most of the real practical and educational problems that other projects have failed with.
* Which is to say; Doctors and some other people really need Latin. A person who doesn't know a little Latin or at least recognise it as Latin is in trouble in lots of situations. Latin is actually pretty surprisingly useful, for a dead language. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if physical Letter writing doesn't become almost completely restricted to specialists like lawyers soon. Just like Latin.
It is a retailer warranty. It only applies as Apple sells something directly to consumers.
In other cases, other retailers have to get Apple to fix the stuff, but Apple isn't directly liable.
The great thing about EU warranties is that you don't have to think about this at all. Both the original supplier and the original retailer are liable. You as a consumer just turn up and hand it over to whoever you find most easily. In some countries the retailer may deny this. If you turn up with a return notice in writing, however, they normally just roll over and do whatever you tell them to. Remember they have 28 days (details probably depend on the country) and after that you can get your money back. This means you want a dated receipt when you hand over your broken product.
Always keep your original proof of purchase (though you might not need that in the UK and some other places if you have some other evidence) and you will get your stuff fixed. Often this is easily worth the difference in price between the US (including sales taxes) and EU. Try comparing with the price in the US with an extended warranty and suddenly you will think you have a bargain.
I'm not sure you can call it unauthorized access (from the criminal standpoint) if you give your password to someone else.
It's not "unauthorized access" to the user's account. It's unauthorized access to Facebook's systems. How you get that access is irrelevant; the question is whether you had permission from the owner (Facebook inc) to use the system (Facebook). If the terms of service allowed handing over of passwords or were ambiguous you might be able to argue that the original user had the right to authorize the access or even that you made a mistake and that you thought they had the right. As it is, however, the terms clearly don't allow that. That makes it completely clear that Facebook has not authorized the access and so it becomes illegal.
This is a clear criminal act for which someone should spend a short time in jail. As current law stands, however, they could be due years up to decades in jail. I would hope Facebook would ask for leniency.
Is FB going to ban the supervisor (if s/he has an account on FB) for breach of the terms of service? That could be an effective deterrent.
Being banned from Facebook is an honor. If they want an effective deterrent then what they want to do is have the woman find out if the school took passwords from any other employees, then verify that these were used. At that point you have an unauthorized computer access for which there are serious laws with serious jail time. Throw the book at whichever members of the school conspired to make those illegal computer accesses.
If you or I accessed a girlfriend's account you would get into serious trouble. If Facebook doesn't make sure the same happens here, they are failing in their duty to use all reasonable means available to protect the integrity of their user's accounts.
N.B. Under section 4 point 8 of Facebook's terms of service, other members of staff are not allowed to hand over their passwords, so the access remains unauthorized even if they agreed to it.
4 Registration and Account Security
Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:
[.. intermediate points elided..]
8. You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.
Slashdot Mirror
But what does blathering on about nothing gains the shill?
Typically two things; 1) we discuss something irrelevant but which forwards the shills interests 2) we don't discuss the main thing. The main thing is:
Microsoft sued Barnes and Noble about patents; The lawsuit ended up being settled by Microsoft paying out 300Million cash!!!
This has the same stucture as the Apple monopoly payout which allowed Apple to survive it's down years. Take away from this:
No, its pointed out that Apple must love F/OSS because they contribute to so much of it.
No, actually, looking at the old discussions, for example the only references to Apple I can find are to their use of open source. You may be right that their contributions should be discussed more, but that's not what happens.
Interestingly enough; it seems to me that this is exactly the situation where the GPL shines through. You want contributions to your project? Put it under the GPL and accept contributions which are under the GPL. Then everybody knows you aren't planning to cheat them. You want to choose a project and contribut to it? Choose one under the GPL; then you know that your contributions and the fixes people make to them will come back to you.
At one time, free software advocates made a big deal out of what they called "Freedom Zero" - the right to run software however one pleases. They hated restrictions and EULAs and developers who made moral judgements
. Users like Apple were using the software the "wrong way" by not contributing to FSF community ecosystem, danceline, and parade floats. So they rewrote the license to restrict Freedom Zero rights... now you can't run software unless I can run it too.
That is fine, but Apple is perfectly within their rights to stick with GPL2, which protects their Freedom Zero rights as originally outlined by RMS.
I think this response to my post really bears reading. It's quite cool and really backs up my point). There's a whole load of random strange vitriol being thrown about. More or less in the "throw enough mud and some of it is bound to stick" frame of mind. Let's just look at how wierd this post is.
The poster says:
then later
the GPLv3 actually contains (in section 2. Basic Permissions.) this explicit clause:
This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program
This is after making it clear that since it's a copyright licence it has nothing to do with your usage; only your distribution of the software. You can't get a more explicit affirmation of freedom zero than that. Why pretend otherwise? Someone is afraid you will protect your software and your users with the GPLv3. Why are they afraid of that? The logical explanation seems to me that they want to screw you and are afraid the GPLv3 will stop them. Let's look at some more of the post:
This is a reply to a post which advocated the GPL without reference to version. Where nobody ever suggested apple shouldn't use the GPLv2 if they want to. It seems like a simple non-sequiteur, yet it isn't. This is dead simple. In setting out to destroy your freedom and their chance of competition, Microsoft and Apple want to reduce the GPL as much as possible since it is the likely source of that competition. The GPLv3 represents a more effective GPL. FUD must be spread to stop it.
Fundamental take home: when someone is lying this hard to try to get you to stop doing something, it's time to start thinking if you shouldn't be doing exactly what they tell you not to do.. I'm personally becoming convinced that the GPLv3 should really be a priority for everybody who cares about the freedom to program as they want.
This is the fifth story[1] based on a single article by one single shill. If this were mere trolling, I'd be grudgingly impressed. As this is a commercial scheme, I hate the guy with passion.
[1]. counting only those I noticed and remember, so there's probably more.
100% true. The way this keeps coming up is a very clear message. That message is:
Whenever we have this discussion it gets pointed out repeatedly that Apple must love F/OSS because they use so much of it. What doesn't get pointed out is that the OpenDarwin project to build a system based on Apple's open source failed for lack of cooperaton from Apple and lack of involvement from their developers. This is symptomatic of Apple's attitude; they will take whatever you give them. They will even co-operate wherever they see clear profit. They will never support things which give their users freedom to work in ways that Apple doesn't approve of. Microsoft's hatred of the GPL is so well documented in their own words that nobody even tries to claim otherwise, except for a few "Microsoft has changed" voices that we have been hearing for years without seeing anything actually changing. Note, however, that Microsoft has quite happily used BSD software all over their system.
Microsoft and Apple don't mind F/OSS as long as it is a box and they can charge you for the use of the box and limit what goes in and out of it. They fear GPL based open source as something which might allow you to create your own box and choose what you want to allow in and out of there. They are doing that by making sure that whatever you do with a computer you have to go through one of their systems. They are aiming to head back to the bad days of the 1980s when you didn't just pay for your compiler software; you actually paid run time licenses for the libraries you used. This is what app stores and their percentage taxes are about. This is what the GPL threatens by giving every computer programmer the chance to contribute to and modify the code.
These stories keep coming up because the various PR shills here want to make people behave differently from their own interests. Remember that and choose the GPL whenever you have the option.
When you first listen to the "the GPL is declining because it's users sue too much" that sort of seems like a reasonable argument for people who are afraid of lawsuits and can't afford the lawyers to understand the licenses.
Then you think about it. The person who is choosing the license is the author of the software. By a strange coincidence, that's also the person who gets to decide whether to sue or not. There is nothing in the GPL which could ever force them to start a lawsuit. The most it can ever do is give them the choice to do so, and even then, only in the situation where someone is cheating on their open source quid pro quo.
Seems to me that this argument is being spread about by the proprietary software houses who want to sucker programmers into allowing them to build private versions without having to pay anything or contribute anything back to the community. Just remember; if there turns out to be a good reason to do so, you can always relicense your GPL code with no protectuion under something like the X11 license. Going the other way is much more risky and difficult.
I think you will find plenty more evidence that Samsung's profit isn't too bad. Having the dominant position in Mobile phones in terms of numbers also tended to lead to very high long term margins. It will be interesting to see how that plays out when there seem to be two stable positions in the market (Apple and Samsung). Although others seem to think one or the other will dominate, I don't think so. The mobile operator's like this situation with real competition and know that Microsoft is out to kill their business so they will probably end up keeping it.
thanks to the microshit idiot in charge, nokia will fail and microshit will pick up the remains for pennies on the dollar.
That would be a repeat of Microsoft's Sendo strategy and would make sense. Sendo seems to have ended in court with a loss / really expensive settlement though; I'm just wondering how Eliop got a worse deal than that past the Nokia board and lawyers though?
The developers for Open Office mostly come from Oracle. However, most of the team was fired or had quit so now that's a much smaller group than the ones working on Libre Office. Also, given Oracle's recent record of attacks on former Sun open source even when it had a supposedly independent "community process" it doesn't seem like a safe bet to most people. It's embarrassing that the Apache foundation got involved in such an obvious act of vandalism.
[Citation Needed]
Citation given
When crap like this is pulled there needs to be a demerit system that now weighs more heavily against the side which was found to behaving unethically.
There isn't a point system. However, there's a much more simple thing, and it's actually the law already. Products from companies involved in corruption should be excluded from all governmental contracts for a period of time as happened for example to Boeing in the USA. If Microsoft products were suspended for e.g. 10 years, this would be a salutory lesson for all involved in corruption.
Why? How should a bank discover the fraud,
Answer a) is whatevery way they want. b) is; if need be by calling the guy back on his phone number; If they are suspicious enough, by having him come into the office and sign it personally whilst being compared against a photo. By requiring him to use a hardware token. Whatever.
What my bank does is sends out an SMS which contains the sum of the transaction; the person it's being paid to and, at the end, an authorization code. As long as my phone isn't hacked they can be pretty sure that I actually authorized the transaction.
if everything is authenticated correctly?
The things were not authenticated correctly. A transaction which the guy didn't want was put through. The authentication system was inadequate for the job and there are very good reasons why people use more sophisticated ones nowadays.
What's most important is that it's the bank which chooses the authentication system. The customer cannot decide that they want to use a different one. Even changing banks often won't help. Because of this, the banks should always take the loss unless the customer acts in a clearly and openly negligent / fraudulent way. If the losses become too big then they can choose to change. If they are acceptable then they can choose a cheaper authentication system. In this case went for the cheaper system rather than a smar card/ certificate based one which would have protected the guy against his own mistake. That decision probably saved them millions of Euros; they can afford to pay out in this particular case.
Is a bank also responsible for your losses if a guy comes to your front door, poses as a bank clerk and you cut him a cheque?
This depends. If the bank provides a service where they come to your door and there was no reasonable, easy way for you to tell this wasn't a person from that service without using specialist knowledge, then yes. If, on the other hand they don't provide such a service or they make sure that you can easily identify the service, then maybe not. They would have to do something like not carrying out the transactions you asked for if you didn't specfically verithfy the clerk via a phone call so that you learn that you have to do that every time.
There are limits, but the primary responsibility should be on the banks side and they should always have to proove that the customer did something fraudulent or negligent to avoid that.
Ok, so taking in what you posted still does not get them out of hot water, and still keeps me in hot water. Just because I was lax in not getting a license before I stored mp3's n such that does not excuse google from not having a license for files on their service.
Luckily for you that's not mentioned in the article ;-) However, in this case, provided that they follow procedures which Google already has in place due to all it's other services, they are covered by the DMCA and similar legislation. All they have to do is to remove the content when the content owner notifies them that it's copied without a license and you fail to give a counter notice. There are very few jurisdictions nowadays where an online service is liable for the misbehaviour of their users provided that they react to notification of it.
I really like the way that two posters, including an AC have managed to provide the fully correct design for this within ten minutes of the original design improvement proposal whilst, at the same time, the embedded device manufacturers can't get it right after decades of trying. The main positive take away is that the human race is doomed and will be replaced by more intelligent cockroaches.
[..] google would also be liable since they then claim license over the files I uploaded.
If you had read the fine article and followed the links (don't reply "you must be new here"; I am the RTFA troll; you will have been trolled) then you would have noticed this term:
Do you think Google's lawyers were born yesterday? You will come into the court room strictly on your own. Google's largest likely involvement will be to twist the knife the (MP/RI)AA sticks into you.
Because their standard license (which is what this is) also covers youtube, etc.
If Google goes bankrupt, then this license may end up being the only thing protecting your data. I don't think that they are doing this maliciously and I do think that if enough people protest that will fix it, but I don't think it should just be dismissed by saying "oh; they promised not to be evil". If you think Google can't go bankrupt, please remember that five years ago Microsoft also looked completely invulnerable. Almost nobody could imagine them not being dominant in personal computing. Things like iOS and Android turn up and suddenly they look like DEC dealing with the arrival of the Microprocessor. In ten years time the same could easily happen to Google.
The "ray of sanity" is allowing the user to decide.
Flash is; together with Java (applets; server side Java is fine); the current big cause of security holes and both set out to be things that nobody could avoid having. These are two archaic, proprietary nightmares which, together with H.264, were disrupting the chance to have a standardised free web. Destroying Flash, which is taking .NET with it, is about the best thing Apple has done in the last ten years.
If Google only has the guts to completely kill off the companies using H.264 then we will see something really good and a real proof of the value of competition in the computing industry. I have been just blown away by the fact that, for the first time in a number of years, I am completely happy running a computer without any Flash install at all.
Not only that, but his publication mentions ZERO (0) references: he cites noone!
Not only accused of wreckless driving, he is doing some pretty wreckless sciencing too!
I think that as long as we are sure he will remain wreckless then we really have no justification for charging him for reckless driving. In fact, given the way that anti-scientific elements are wrecking our education system then we wouldn't be considered reckless for encouraging him to go on as he reckoning on doing.
The documentation tries to document what your intentions are, just like the code tries to implement them. The code can fail to do its job, and of course the documentation can too!
This is 4/insightful? On the scale of today's article that's probably right too but if you look at the history of this stuff it should be 1/redundant. We seem to be continually rediscovering the computer science of the 60s. I mean, how can we be discussing this without even mentioning literate programming a 1970s answer to the problems which you get when you start to use documentation for code maintenance?
I mean, some poor guy writes a blog spreading wisdom to himself and his five friends who are just discovering about how to lead programming teams (there's nothing wrong with that; one of his friends should just point him to some of the literate programming discussions and some of the rants of Linus Torvalds against over-documentation, for example). What's wrong is when it gets plastered on the front of Slashdot and we take it seriously.
What's next? Rediscovering that it's a good idea to test things in a separate environment before deploying them in the real world?
And then used an "entirely voluntary" d-notice to ensure that the newspaper's reported the CSI story as part of their campaign to show that forensic science services are just fine. To be honest, when you look at the stupidities of the UK system there's no logical way that the people in the UK can be more free than people living in the US, yet they are.
> highlight the folly of pushing technology without support. Sugata Mitra might disagree: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
Maybe the teachers are the problem, and the kids should be given the OLPCs without any interference...
If you ask me; this attitude may be part of what's holding OLPC back. Mitra's experiment shows that there are kids out there that can teach themselves. Lots more that can teach themselves with a little start from others. It says nothing about the kids that never even tried to use the computer. Some kids, if left on their own will teach themselves. Many many kids will not. Plenty of people will go a long way if you give them a little starting push to help them along. These people will be voting on your future and have to understand issues like computerised voting and privacy laws if we are to get sensible government.
I think many of the people on this site, being IT/computing/technology people in work now, will have taught themselves most of what they know. There just wasn't anything around to teach us what we needed when we needed it. We then tend to undervalue even the stuff that was taught to us. Even more, we tend to be the people who were held back by the teachers and forget that there were others that were different.
You need to provide both good teaching and opportunity for kids to self develop. Miss either one of them and you will cause damage.
Perhaps the laptops should be issued to all students who do all their homework and appear to be giving school a go. Don't have to be good, but should try and be rewarded for it.
Both you and the grandparent are completely missing the point. The world has changed and Reading wRiting and aRithmetic are no longer sufficient. Every single person needs to properly understand computation and computers otherwise they will never understand the world around them and will believe in Voodoo like voting machines and terrorist profiling. If you only give the bright kids computers they will be stigmatised as different and the others will fall behind. Even normal things, like writing a letter, have completely changed and are becoming as valuable as Latin*. Normal jobs for normal people are now advertised on Facebook and for most people's lives; definitely those that are educated today, writing a social network posting may be a more important skill that normal writing. That's a really scary world for people who have only a traditional education and haven't made the shift to computing.
Something has to be done. Previous attempts with standard computers have failed with either the students simply playing games (given Windows computers at home) or with Teachers simply repeating old subjects on a computer and without getting much learning benefit at all. OLPC may be misguided, but it isn't misguided in the way it's primitivist critics seem to think; it has at least attempted to identify and address most of the real practical and educational problems that other projects have failed with.
* Which is to say; Doctors and some other people really need Latin. A person who doesn't know a little Latin or at least recognise it as Latin is in trouble in lots of situations. Latin is actually pretty surprisingly useful, for a dead language. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if physical Letter writing doesn't become almost completely restricted to specialists like lawyers soon. Just like Latin.
No; no. We're patenting patents "on a computer". It's an entirely new invention never thought of before.
It is a retailer warranty. It only applies as Apple sells something directly to consumers. In other cases, other retailers have to get Apple to fix the stuff, but Apple isn't directly liable.
The great thing about EU warranties is that you don't have to think about this at all. Both the original supplier and the original retailer are liable. You as a consumer just turn up and hand it over to whoever you find most easily. In some countries the retailer may deny this. If you turn up with a return notice in writing, however, they normally just roll over and do whatever you tell them to. Remember they have 28 days (details probably depend on the country) and after that you can get your money back. This means you want a dated receipt when you hand over your broken product.
Always keep your original proof of purchase (though you might not need that in the UK and some other places if you have some other evidence) and you will get your stuff fixed. Often this is easily worth the difference in price between the US (including sales taxes) and EU. Try comparing with the price in the US with an extended warranty and suddenly you will think you have a bargain.
I'm not sure you can call it unauthorized access (from the criminal standpoint) if you give your password to someone else.
It's not "unauthorized access" to the user's account. It's unauthorized access to Facebook's systems. How you get that access is irrelevant; the question is whether you had permission from the owner (Facebook inc) to use the system (Facebook). If the terms of service allowed handing over of passwords or were ambiguous you might be able to argue that the original user had the right to authorize the access or even that you made a mistake and that you thought they had the right. As it is, however, the terms clearly don't allow that. That makes it completely clear that Facebook has not authorized the access and so it becomes illegal.
This is a clear criminal act for which someone should spend a short time in jail. As current law stands, however, they could be due years up to decades in jail. I would hope Facebook would ask for leniency.
Is FB going to ban the supervisor (if s/he has an account on FB) for breach of the terms of service? That could be an effective deterrent.
Being banned from Facebook is an honor. If they want an effective deterrent then what they want to do is have the woman find out if the school took passwords from any other employees, then verify that these were used. At that point you have an unauthorized computer access for which there are serious laws with serious jail time. Throw the book at whichever members of the school conspired to make those illegal computer accesses.
If you or I accessed a girlfriend's account you would get into serious trouble. If Facebook doesn't make sure the same happens here, they are failing in their duty to use all reasonable means available to protect the integrity of their user's accounts.
N.B. Under section 4 point 8 of Facebook's terms of service, other members of staff are not allowed to hand over their passwords, so the access remains unauthorized even if they agreed to it.
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