It's clear they were sensitive to the notion that their platform might run afoul of Sun's Java patent licensing;
Many a truth is said with a sarcastic tone of voice. I suspect they were doing their best. Given that it turns out that most of the patents were invalid, however, I don't really see what they could have reasonably done. I hereby claim to own your entire home city and everything in it by decree of the Congress of the USA. Are you now going to move out of your home just to avoid the possibility of stealing from me?
In light of that, I'm sure they were very careful to document their non-infringing clean-room implementation to protect themselves against just such a claim of infringement. So, if Google truly has found a third way that doesn't infringe in their Dalvik implementation, surely they can demonstrate that in court, and the courts will deny Oracle's claims against Google.
Unfortunately there is no such technique. Clean room implementations avoid copyright; patents work differently. Something that you invented entirely yourself with no benefit from any outside invention can still be patented if someone else came up with the same method previously. For hardware inventions, patents happen rarely. E.g. once or twice a year per inventor. For software, a single person can come up with many inventions in a day. Every function you write represents a new method (otherwise you would have just reused an existing function) in a novel situation (inside your software which you have just written). All it takes is for your implementation to be similar to one someone already patented and you are in breach. "Obviousness" is supposed to be the test which reduces this possibility, however it just simply fails to work in the current system.
Even worse than that, there is the legal fiction that if a company knows about a patent then the programmer writing the software knows about it. Or, maybe it's the other way round. That if the programmer uses a patented method in code (without knowing it's patented) then the lawyers have a way to work that out. Even with patent searches that is impossible. You can't do a patent search for every function written unless lawyers outnumber programmers twenty to one. Google may well be found guilty of "wilful" use of patents but this will be an outrageous injustice.
C'mon. I suddenly realise that I have the first post and it's my duty to save us from another homeopathic Tamagotchi porn posting. I post something vaguely related to the topic and without anything much offensive.. You expect spelling?
My posting even has a serious point though. We'll soon have a situation where everybody from the USA, even cartoon characters, have to be drafted in as lawyers to keep up with all the ongoing law suits. In most countries, the majority of politicians are now lawyers by training (and they didn't used to be..).
In these patent cases, one of the biggest problems is that it's often so expensive to defend a case that everybody settles (after long negotiations, and vast sums of money to the lawyers) even if they think they have a good case. Look also at the SCO case, where a small amount of money from Microsoft and a few other investors was leveraged to cause vast amounts of costs to IBM and Novell.
Getting rid of patents, at least in software, would free up vast amounts of resources. Streamlining court systems so that you could almost always get an initial decision in one to five days and the loser would mostly have to pay for any further action would free up even more resources and would actually improve justice both by delivering it quicker ("justice delayed is..." ) and by allowing the courts to spend time on the cases that actually needed it. Germany already implements such a system in some cases.
The legal system needs to be brought seriously under control.
Brilliant brilliant. If I had been asleep for the last five years I might even fall for it. I wouldn't have heard of Davalik and I wouldn't know that Google found a third way which was neither of those two options. Gosh I've got an email from Winston for you.
Dear Teddie
I'm afraid that the experts say there's no way we can come in via the North of France. If we can't find a way through we'll just have to invade via Spain
Based on that I have absolute proof that the D-Day invasion was a breach of Spains sovereignty. America must pay.
Never mind the fact that we engage in the same business practices and do the same things they do - right down [...]
But not including suing other companies. That may change, but until it does they are the underdog and should be supported in any battle with companies that consider suing the best way to compete.
I think the real question is: "who's paying for the continual stream of anti Google stories in the tech media; why are they so desperate; and do they really think we are that stupid"
We have no idea whether Google's best days are behind it, but Google's main failure has been in social networking where it has finally released a product which, even though it is terribly incomplete, limited and difficult to get into, is considered by most people who've used it as much better than Facebook. The article is so desperate to discredit Google that it links to what seems to be an MS stooge review rather than actual information about sales.
I dislike "the cloud" term as much as the next/.er but right now its working as intended.
That seems to be true for Amazon; the outage is exactly what they documented in the case of the loss of a data centre. I'll give them (tentative) points for a job acceptably done*. You can't, however, say the same for Microsoft. They had a user visible application level outage for the loss of a single location. That's a screw up and clearly shows why you shouldn't trust anything "business critical" to just one cloud.
* we still don't have clarity about the physical separation between their generator and phase synchronisation system. I don't know if they could have saved themselves with a proper physical layout of their separated power supplies. Also we have no idea what caused the transformer to be struck instead of just some lightning protector.
The problem with your theory is this: You don't blame the US government when old Spam King pounds the living shit out of FB do you?
The key difference here is that you know that it was the spam king because there was a public prosecution for the spamming. Show clear evidence of even an investigation by the Chinese authorities in cooperation with the companies making the reports and you would have a very clear point. China is not a country like Sudan where there is no effective government. They are fully capable of launching detailed police investigations into hacking if they wish to.
Fair trade should be fostered but not at the expense of your own country both in terms of it's economic viability but its social structure as well.
I think that's the wrong attitude. If fair trade is fostered then that's fine. If the other country does better out of it then that's just spreading the wealth about fairly. The problem is that currently the trade is not fair. There must be equivalent or better situations in terms of environmental conditions, working conditions, and freedom. Those are reasonable things to insist on for fair trade. In the meantime, you can't insist on a set of IP laws which let the US use all of China's inventions for free (gunpowder, toilet paper, the seismometer, the restaurant menu etc.) whilst demanding that the Chinese pay for the use of US inventions (bits of people's DNA, the particularly strange layout of the FAT file system and how to work around it's limitations, Microsoft Windows, Winnie the Pooh (that was American, wasn't it) etc.).
Except that there is another report which has just been released which gives a direct link to China for . If McAfee don't have direct evidence, that means that they have released the report before they completed the work; they should have done something to identify the end point. Someone should discuss with one of the security services to put a poisoned document with an MSWord zero day which phones home when given a chance into one of their document caches and then see where it turns up.
If he didn't take the bullet by attempting to lie Google probably has enough datamined info to have him cloned and replaced by a believable, more obedient version.
This. Now I shall never dare to apply for that job at Google.
Because no one cares. Nothing of value was lost and no one gives a crap.
Maybe. Nobody knows; but Chinese companies have been winning lots of surprising contracts recently. And Chinese people have been dying because their government thought they could build signalling systems just because they had a few new blueprints. Quite a bit may have been lost by some people. On the other hand, maybe the Chinese deserve a bit of development. It's not like they go around killing that many foreigners since Tibet. Even in India they have been pretty restrained (relatively speaking).
Ohh a cyberwar. What the hell is that?
Not really relevant to the current case which seems to be Cyber-Espionage or maybe at most Cyber-cold-war. You'll know a cyber warfare when parts of power plants near you start exploding and your nearby dam opens it's flood gates with no warning. Cyber warfare should be clearly defined as people dying in large numbers and/or huge amounts of property damage. I'm not sure there's such a thing as a pure "cyber war" however because I would guess that in most cases conventional forces will get involved pretty quickly. However it's possible (e.g. due to outside constraints and/or limited goals).
the story is put up by an organisation which regularly fronts for Microsoft;
the story matches Microsoft's style
Microsoft puts up such stories regularly
Microsoft hides it's astro-turfing regularly
This is certainly not enough to get a conviction in a court of law, but it's definitely "evidence"
Let's have a look at one of the sentences.
Macs provide good protection against the initial phases of the attack, but once the bad guys are on the network, it's a whole different story. "They're pretty good for [protecting from] remote exploitation," Stamos said. "[But] once you install OS X server you're toast."
This is a standard "dog whistle" for the non-technical / security afraid. Notice that the paragraph structure completely negates the information structure. OS X server has nothing to do with whether the bad guys are local or remote. To me or you this sounds like two different bits of information. A) there's some local exploit (which isn't backed up in the article) and B) OS X server is vulnerable. To the target audience, who know that networks are dangerous this translates as:
If you connect your OS X laptop to a network it's toast.
This is a typical Microsoft non sequitur and in it's self is "evidence"
Now it's clear, we don't have enough "evidence" to secure a criminal conviction. Even a civil case, "on the balance of probabilities" would be difficult against Microsoft's highly paid lawyers and a less than fully technical jury. However, we have evidence and even if, as it could be in theory this is just a copycat article, you know and I know that most such communication is paid for by Microsoft.
No they weren't. They were invited to partner with Microsoft buying the Novell patents. Not the Nortel ones. Do you MS trolls think that if you just repeat it often enough we will think it's true? Apparently so.
This is a deliberate misreading of the sentence from the original posting from Google:
They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them; seeking $15 licensing fees for every Android device;
The original post was clearly referring to a) Microsoft trying to acquire Novell's patents as a threat and b) trying to acquire Nortel's patents to stop Google getting them. The thing is, though, the Novell deal would have been a waste of time for Google; firstly those patents weren't a threat since Google's OIN membership protected them from the patents and secondly (as has been added to the end of the original Google blog) it would be impossible for Google to assert the patents against Microsoft, which would have been the whole value of them.
What's astounding is how stupid Microsoft must think people are to think we can't spot this by just following the postings. Probably more so judging by how many people seem to have been taken in, how much they are right.
You'd think the world would have learned the lesson about investing in Microsoft-only technologies after IE6 and ActiveX. It seems a lot of people are in fact learning disabled.
I think they have. The lesson the guys who decide which technology to use have learned is that if you invest in MS technologies and put them in your customers you'll have several good years. Then Microsoft will outdate those technologies soon and give you another round at the same consulting money.
I would go further and say that the data of GUILTY people should also be theirs to control.
I was careful not to state that for a reason. There is a fundamental principle of justice that it should be not just done, but "seen to be done". In other words if your neighbours see you cheating for years and years, but then, finally someone reports you and you get done, they then see that their honesty in that time was not only valued by themselves. In the end; after time has been served; full rights and privacy should be restored. It may be that the only way we can do that will be by limiting access to the data about the guilty, but we should try find a way which doesn't disturb the "seen to be done" principle.
This is one of the things that the "hang them high" brigade don't seem to get. The most important thing in dissuading people is the chance they can be caught. If punishment is disproportional to crime then people become unwilling to report and so fewer people get caught. I would never report seeing a food theft in the USA because it would run an unethical risk of hitting a mother of a hungry child with a three strikes and your out conviction.
Normally; Mod you down. Most of the people coming to slashdot wouldn't even notice your post. Today, your post is relevant and valuable and absolutely to the point. What damage did it do? None. Would it have even been noticed if I didn't choose to browse with your post visible. No.
All FaceBook has to do to solve the anonymous user problem is have an option to ignore users suspected of not having valid names and have it turned on by default. They could even delete insulting accounts as well. The reason they choose a different option has nothing to do with the quality of the debate.
Google is worse still, but Google is more clever and knows most everything about you, right down to the freckles on your butt.
Are they? Maybe in the data they have gathered; but I think Facebook is doing their best to fix it. I'll wait for a final opinion on Google+, but up till now Google has actively resisted giving full data out to advertisers and was keeping pretty good data protection internally (from what I could tell from the outside, admittedly). Google has the potential to become lots worse than Facebook, but in terms of selling on and making available personal data about you, Facebook has been much worse.
Facebook has also been much more dangerous since the data that it has chosen is exactly the data needed by opressive regimes and since Facebook has been trying to get in the way of social interaction. By doing that they are encouraging groups to come together and then setting up the framework needed to betray them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's definitely what Google suggests..
Which part of "You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly (and vice-versa)." is it that you are unable to read?
It's clear they were sensitive to the notion that their platform might run afoul of Sun's Java patent licensing;
Many a truth is said with a sarcastic tone of voice. I suspect they were doing their best. Given that it turns out that most of the patents were invalid, however, I don't really see what they could have reasonably done. I hereby claim to own your entire home city and everything in it by decree of the Congress of the USA. Are you now going to move out of your home just to avoid the possibility of stealing from me?
In light of that, I'm sure they were very careful to document their non-infringing clean-room implementation to protect themselves against just such a claim of infringement. So, if Google truly has found a third way that doesn't infringe in their Dalvik implementation, surely they can demonstrate that in court, and the courts will deny Oracle's claims against Google.
Unfortunately there is no such technique. Clean room implementations avoid copyright; patents work differently. Something that you invented entirely yourself with no benefit from any outside invention can still be patented if someone else came up with the same method previously. For hardware inventions, patents happen rarely. E.g. once or twice a year per inventor. For software, a single person can come up with many inventions in a day. Every function you write represents a new method (otherwise you would have just reused an existing function) in a novel situation (inside your software which you have just written). All it takes is for your implementation to be similar to one someone already patented and you are in breach. "Obviousness" is supposed to be the test which reduces this possibility, however it just simply fails to work in the current system.
Even worse than that, there is the legal fiction that if a company knows about a patent then the programmer writing the software knows about it. Or, maybe it's the other way round. That if the programmer uses a patented method in code (without knowing it's patented) then the lawyers have a way to work that out. Even with patent searches that is impossible. You can't do a patent search for every function written unless lawyers outnumber programmers twenty to one. Google may well be found guilty of "wilful" use of patents but this will be an outrageous injustice.
C'mon. I suddenly realise that I have the first post and it's my duty to save us from another homeopathic Tamagotchi porn posting. I post something vaguely related to the topic and without anything much offensive.. You expect spelling?
My posting even has a serious point though. We'll soon have a situation where everybody from the USA, even cartoon characters, have to be drafted in as lawyers to keep up with all the ongoing law suits. In most countries, the majority of politicians are now lawyers by training (and they didn't used to be..).
In these patent cases, one of the biggest problems is that it's often so expensive to defend a case that everybody settles (after long negotiations, and vast sums of money to the lawyers) even if they think they have a good case. Look also at the SCO case, where a small amount of money from Microsoft and a few other investors was leveraged to cause vast amounts of costs to IBM and Novell.
Getting rid of patents, at least in software, would free up vast amounts of resources. Streamlining court systems so that you could almost always get an initial decision in one to five days and the loser would mostly have to pay for any further action would free up even more resources and would actually improve justice both by delivering it quicker ("justice delayed is..." ) and by allowing the courts to spend time on the cases that actually needed it. Germany already implements such a system in some cases.
The legal system needs to be brought seriously under control.
Based on that I have absolute proof that the D-Day invasion was a breach of Spains sovereignty. America must pay.
Never mind the fact that we engage in the same business practices and do the same things they do - right down [...]
But not including suing other companies. That may change, but until it does they are the underdog and should be supported in any battle with companies that consider suing the best way to compete.
Pinkey and the Brain (lawyers, newly qualified)
The real question is to define best days.
I think the real question is: "who's paying for the continual stream of anti Google stories in the tech media; why are they so desperate; and do they really think we are that stupid"
We have no idea whether Google's best days are behind it, but Google's main failure has been in social networking where it has finally released a product which, even though it is terribly incomplete, limited and difficult to get into, is considered by most people who've used it as much better than Facebook. The article is so desperate to discredit Google that it links to what seems to be an MS stooge review rather than actual information about sales.
I dislike "the cloud" term as much as the next /.er but right now its working as intended.
That seems to be true for Amazon; the outage is exactly what they documented in the case of the loss of a data centre. I'll give them (tentative) points for a job acceptably done*. You can't, however, say the same for Microsoft. They had a user visible application level outage for the loss of a single location. That's a screw up and clearly shows why you shouldn't trust anything "business critical" to just one cloud.
* we still don't have clarity about the physical separation between their generator and phase synchronisation system. I don't know if they could have saved themselves with a proper physical layout of their separated power supplies. Also we have no idea what caused the transformer to be struck instead of just some lightning protector.
The problem with your theory is this: You don't blame the US government when old Spam King pounds the living shit out of FB do you?
The key difference here is that you know that it was the spam king because there was a public prosecution for the spamming. Show clear evidence of even an investigation by the Chinese authorities in cooperation with the companies making the reports and you would have a very clear point. China is not a country like Sudan where there is no effective government. They are fully capable of launching detailed police investigations into hacking if they wish to.
Fair trade should be fostered but not at the expense of your own country both in terms of it's economic viability but its social structure as well.
I think that's the wrong attitude. If fair trade is fostered then that's fine. If the other country does better out of it then that's just spreading the wealth about fairly. The problem is that currently the trade is not fair. There must be equivalent or better situations in terms of environmental conditions, working conditions, and freedom. Those are reasonable things to insist on for fair trade. In the meantime, you can't insist on a set of IP laws which let the US use all of China's inventions for free (gunpowder, toilet paper, the seismometer, the restaurant menu etc.) whilst demanding that the Chinese pay for the use of US inventions (bits of people's DNA, the particularly strange layout of the FAT file system and how to work around it's limitations, Microsoft Windows, Winnie the Pooh (that was American, wasn't it) etc.).
Except that there is another report which has just been released which gives a direct link to China for . If McAfee don't have direct evidence, that means that they have released the report before they completed the work; they should have done something to identify the end point. Someone should discuss with one of the security services to put a poisoned document with an MSWord zero day which phones home when given a chance into one of their document caches and then see where it turns up.
If he didn't take the bullet by attempting to lie Google probably has enough datamined info to have him cloned and replaced by a believable, more obedient version.
This. Now I shall never dare to apply for that job at Google.
You have a choice to use their services. Take them or leave them.
This is not always true. Enough things are beginning to rely on Facebook that you may need an account merely for your job or similar.
Do you have a link for that? I guess that they just slowed down the policy enforcement after all the complaints.
anything encrypted in a way they cannot decode is rejected or held pending business justification
Most of the rest sounds great (at least from the point of view of being secure), but I bet that this means you send most of email unencrypted. Hmm.
Because no one cares. Nothing of value was lost and no one gives a crap.
Maybe. Nobody knows; but Chinese companies have been winning lots of surprising contracts recently. And Chinese people have been dying because their government thought they could build signalling systems just because they had a few new blueprints. Quite a bit may have been lost by some people. On the other hand, maybe the Chinese deserve a bit of development. It's not like they go around killing that many foreigners since Tibet. Even in India they have been pretty restrained (relatively speaking).
Ohh a cyberwar. What the hell is that?
Not really relevant to the current case which seems to be Cyber-Espionage or maybe at most Cyber-cold-war. You'll know a cyber warfare when parts of power plants near you start exploding and your nearby dam opens it's flood gates with no warning. Cyber warfare should be clearly defined as people dying in large numbers and/or huge amounts of property damage. I'm not sure there's such a thing as a pure "cyber war" however because I would guess that in most cases conventional forces will get involved pretty quickly. However it's possible (e.g. due to outside constraints and/or limited goals).
This is certainly not enough to get a conviction in a court of law, but it's definitely "evidence" Let's have a look at one of the sentences.
This is a standard "dog whistle" for the non-technical / security afraid. Notice that the paragraph structure completely negates the information structure. OS X server has nothing to do with whether the bad guys are local or remote. To me or you this sounds like two different bits of information. A) there's some local exploit (which isn't backed up in the article) and B) OS X server is vulnerable. To the target audience, who know that networks are dangerous this translates as:
If you connect your OS X laptop to a network it's toast.
This is a typical Microsoft non sequitur and in it's self is "evidence"
Now it's clear, we don't have enough "evidence" to secure a criminal conviction. Even a civil case, "on the balance of probabilities" would be difficult against Microsoft's highly paid lawyers and a less than fully technical jury. However, we have evidence and even if, as it could be in theory this is just a copycat article, you know and I know that most such communication is paid for by Microsoft.
No they weren't. They were invited to partner with Microsoft buying the Novell patents. Not the Nortel ones. Do you MS trolls think that if you just repeat it often enough we will think it's true? Apparently so.
The original post was clearly referring to a) Microsoft trying to acquire Novell's patents as a threat and b) trying to acquire Nortel's patents to stop Google getting them. The thing is, though, the Novell deal would have been a waste of time for Google; firstly those patents weren't a threat since Google's OIN membership protected them from the patents and secondly (as has been added to the end of the original Google blog) it would be impossible for Google to assert the patents against Microsoft, which would have been the whole value of them.
What's astounding is how stupid Microsoft must think people are to think we can't spot this by just following the postings. Probably more so judging by how many people seem to have been taken in, how much they are right.
You'd think the world would have learned the lesson about investing in Microsoft-only technologies after IE6 and ActiveX. It seems a lot of people are in fact learning disabled.
I think they have. The lesson the guys who decide which technology to use have learned is that if you invest in MS technologies and put them in your customers you'll have several good years. Then Microsoft will outdate those technologies soon and give you another round at the same consulting money.
tl;dr:
if you want to tell people something boring; put it in a video add some explosions and other movie effects.
(I worked this out by starting reading the paragraphs in the article in reverse order - that seems about the best way this time round)
This was possibly the most painful post selecting my slashdot nick has inflicted on my so far.
I would go further and say that the data of GUILTY people should also be theirs to control.
I was careful not to state that for a reason. There is a fundamental principle of justice that it should be not just done, but "seen to be done". In other words if your neighbours see you cheating for years and years, but then, finally someone reports you and you get done, they then see that their honesty in that time was not only valued by themselves. In the end; after time has been served; full rights and privacy should be restored. It may be that the only way we can do that will be by limiting access to the data about the guilty, but we should try find a way which doesn't disturb the "seen to be done" principle.
This is one of the things that the "hang them high" brigade don't seem to get. The most important thing in dissuading people is the chance they can be caught. If punishment is disproportional to crime then people become unwilling to report and so fewer people get caught. I would never report seeing a food theft in the USA because it would run an unethical risk of hitting a mother of a hungry child with a three strikes and your out conviction.
I'm posting AC so what are you gonna do about it?
Normally; Mod you down. Most of the people coming to slashdot wouldn't even notice your post. Today, your post is relevant and valuable and absolutely to the point. What damage did it do? None. Would it have even been noticed if I didn't choose to browse with your post visible. No.
All FaceBook has to do to solve the anonymous user problem is have an option to ignore users suspected of not having valid names and have it turned on by default. They could even delete insulting accounts as well. The reason they choose a different option has nothing to do with the quality of the debate.
Google is worse still, but Google is more clever and knows most everything about you, right down to the freckles on your butt.
Are they? Maybe in the data they have gathered; but I think Facebook is doing their best to fix it. I'll wait for a final opinion on Google+, but up till now Google has actively resisted giving full data out to advertisers and was keeping pretty good data protection internally (from what I could tell from the outside, admittedly). Google has the potential to become lots worse than Facebook, but in terms of selling on and making available personal data about you, Facebook has been much worse.
Facebook has also been much more dangerous since the data that it has chosen is exactly the data needed by opressive regimes and since Facebook has been trying to get in the way of social interaction. By doing that they are encouraging groups to come together and then setting up the framework needed to betray them.