Because, as with quantum cryptography and most other security measures, the measure is theoretically perfect and practically irrelevant. You may be able to verify that your vote matches your number, but the system can give several people the same number without any way for them to realise. You may be able to verify perfectly, but that can be used to indimidate you.
This comment seems to sum up the arrogant stupidity of so many posters here so well. I'll grant the poster below that probably the US army could nuke away the red army (though remember China has nukes too, and has been specifically targeting US military systems for a while, so we can assume they have at least some secret systems to do so effectively). The idea that a bunch of gun nuts interfering is going to do anything except slow down the bullets from mini-guns is so stupid that the only comparable stupidity is that of people telling the country that invented toilet paper, most of the basic vegetables you eat, gunpowder that you need for your wars and a bunch of other things that you just expect to use without thought that they own you for your "intellectual property" because "we say so".
China's development is likely to slow down lots; They have environmental problems beyond belief which are going to mess up their economy whether they try to ignore them or not. Building them up into a magical dragon about to eat the world is not going to help you in dealing with this. On the other hand, just a little bit of respect for your fellow intelligent human beings would really really help you to develop into some kind of civilization. Failing to underestimate your potential opponents will also help you avoid problems like the Battle of Unsan. If you could show some kind of consistent respect for the Chinese at the same time as not continually selling out your industrial secrets and industrial future for cheap plastic toys.
Well; we have the source;. If the FO i FOSS is to ever mean something, this is the stage at which we should fork and start contributing as much as possible under a license which Microsoft will never steal (e.g. the AGPLv3). This is going to be interesting and hard to kill.
hmmm.. I would seriously not be surprised if the entire idea of this linkage is to create a patent toll organisation. Expect Nokia and MS to spin off a body for patent licensing together under the cover of cooperating Windows 7 phone. The idea that Windows Phone 7 which is commercial disaster for Microsoft already is going to help Nokia is laughable. The idea that they could both together get all their competition banned is not so stupid.
Elop comes from Microsoft of exactly the era after they had come up with SCO.
On most phones there is some insulator between you and the antenna. This means that you simply can't grip "where the antenna is located" without taking the phone apart. You can't "touch" the antenna. You have a plastic case and inside that the antenna.
Let's be absolutely clear about this. It's all a matter of proportion. It's possible to set up a test where the phone is exactly on the limit of it's reception strength and then put a small pebble metres from the phone, but close to the base station and have that reduce the signal strength enough to cause the phone to fail. It is always possible to influence the signal with your body. The difference with the iPhone is the direct coupling which allows a massively greater drop in signal strength than could every be achieved on a different phone.
Yes, it's possible to fake demos where the signal strength happens to be just above some threshold. Yes most of the demos online are unscientific (you can't use "bars" as a measure of signal strength. Yes, the iPhone still has a specific problem that it shouldn't have.
All phones have a "death grip" that drops the signal.
Except that that's total crap and has been gone over on slashdot so often that I refuse to even give you a link. The recap is; all phones can have the signal physically blocked by putting bits of your body between the antenna and the signal source. This causes some signal loss, but is difficult to notice under normal circumstances. The iPhone has an external non-insulated antenna which, when you touch it, get's detuned. This causes a larger signal strength drop than in almost any circumstance on a normal phone. The solution; hold it differently or buy an insulating cover which separates your finger from the iPhone. If you have insualtion then you will go back to the same level as problem as a normal phone.
People who either deny it or claim that it's the end of the world are both wrong.
Your response seems to be to a strange bunch of things I didn't say. I shall pick some random points that I can understand enough to make a useful reply to.
and if they do release their code, their competitors can use it, so their lawyers advise them against.
This is complete nonsense. Prefer the GPL? Okay, release your modifications under the GPL. Its been done over and over again. You think every utility in a linux distro was written from scratch when bsd versions were out there? of course not.
I just didn't say any of the things you seem to be answering here. Maybe I wasn't clear?
After a few years they either get so wildly successful (JunOS / OSX / Microsoft TCP/IP stack) that they keep their own completely proprietary branch and never help anyone else or they get abandoned (IPSO / AlchemOS / BSDi / SunOS / etc. etc.)
And what's with the Sun hate?
This is one of the most bizzare questions I have ever been asked. I thought Sun was great. I loved SunOS. I even came to accept Solaris. What are you even replying to? I mentioned SunOS as abandoned, but the reason for that was not Sun's fault. However, if BSD had been GPL licensed then SunOS likely would have too and could have continued till today; probably as part of the standard BSD system.
SunOS may have died, but a few people might still be using a little thing called NFS. Sun contributed TONS back to the open source community, and naming a project here and there that they kept closed won't change that.
A bunch of things where the fact they were released under the BSD license ended up benefitting Microsoft and killing Sun. In the end with Java they ended up with a mad bureaucracy in the JCP. Had they just been consistently GPL from the beginning I think they would have had fewer problems.
This has become much more visible recently with Android and other successes
If I didn't realize people would take you seriously, it would be absolutely HILARIOUS that you've singled out Android as the great FOSS success, and yet complain about Darwin being proprietary in the same breath.
I can show you several examples of Android based independent OS releases. I believe that OpenDarwin "died a lonely death". (please feel free to correct me if there is someone else who has released a consumer ready Darwin based OS). What this means is that in practice normal people can have homebrew versions of android and can develop on them and cannot do the same with Darwin.
Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about in regards to press of BSD vs GPL/Linux... When iPhone took over the world, we weren't hearing what a vindication it was of BSD. But when anything Linux-based gets slightly popular, even trivial nonsense like basic WiFi routers, roll out the screaming fanbois...
I think the difference is that normally the Linux devices mean there's a chance for further interesting hacking (see Linksys L series routers for example) whilst the BSD based systems basically just end up as embedded, unalterable systems where the best hope is to jailbreak. Who cares what's inside if you can't touch it? I think this is, to be honest the biggest problem with Linux being stuck with GPLv2. There's a definite space for someone to launch a hardcore AGPLv3 OS on which web/cloud based solutions could be safely released.
Actually Android is a perfect example. The GPLv2 is just on the edge of being a strong enough copyleft license; sometimes good enough, often not. Unfortunately, Linus has repeatedly weakened it further, both by supporting Tivioisation and by supporting linking binary blobs. Now that weakness is coming back to haunt Linux. Android is not just failing to contribute it's actually sucking part of the life from Linux.
Before I start; you are making the fundamental technical person's standard mistake of thinking that law deals with actions rather than intent. It's a very different way of thinking and really matters
What if I say online: "Everyone Point your browsers at: www.mastercard.com" -- Am I now a DDOS perpetrator?
Probably yes. At least for conspiracy.
Well, I just did -- Conspiracy to do what?
Conspiracy to deliberately overload the site.
I think the Slashdot effect is more powerful than many of the LOIC attacks -- Slashdot posts links to websites; In essence this is exactly saying, "point your browser at: example.com". Surely you don't mean that when example.com goes down due to a slashdot article link all of us visitors are breaking the law? How do you distinguish a traffic from a Slashdot visitor repeatedly clicking an article link that points to a downed website from LOIC attack traffic that may be occurring at the same time? You don't.
Check if someone posted a link on Slashdot. If not it wasn't related. Contact, randomly, a sample of the people who just visited the page. Ask them why they did it. 90% will just tell you in anything approaching a police interview. Once you have the main group pointing towards one web site, examine that site. Do most people post there to cause problems or for a good reason? Was there an alternative explanation for the posting? Raid the guy who posted the link and some of his friends. Did they discuss doing damage to mastercard or not? If so, you have your case. If not, use the drugs you will find in at least one guys house to get him to confess it was done deliberately. Use that confession to get a warrant on the poster. Start spying on him. Try to get him on tape saying he did it. Etc. etc.
N.B. If you post a link to Slashdot because you want to take down someone's site, that is a DoS attack. If you make the exact same posting because you want to advertise their service, that is a friendly act!
What if I do it for no reason at all? Can you really prove that such a plugin has a purpose other than to open a tab and reload it?
The phrase you really want here is "prove beyond reasonable doubt" and in fact that means "persuade a jury to accept voting for your guilt if I tell them it has to be beyond reasonable doubt". The first answer is, after this slashdot posting, it will be dead easy.
What if I do it so that people can run a traffic test on their own websites? This is what LOIC was designed to do... Guns designed to hunt ducks can be used on other objects -- It's not the gun maker's fault when a person is killed by firearms. It's not the security researcher's fault when someone takes their tools and uses them to cause harm. It's not Slashdot's fault that a website has insufficient bandwidth to support the visitor flood a frontpage article causes. It's not the creator of the LOIC tool's fault that it was used to DDOS someone.
These are all examples of "plausible deniability". This is a good strategy for getting away with things, but it's not nearly as good as most people think. Most of the time, people claim they did things for one reason and somehow or other it's shown that that wasn't true. E.g. you say "I did it because I love the mastercard corporation and want to see that their website is up all the time", all it takes is an ex-girlfriend who remembers some rant you gave about the evils of the company and you will be completely screwed. It is true, however, that even Richard Nixon managed to avoid impeachment by using this strategy.
Reformat you hard drive, then run over pedestrians with your car.
There, now go do that and try to sue me for damaging your har
What if I say online: "Everyone Point your browsers at: www.mastercard.com" -- Am I now a DDOS perpetrator?
Probably yes. At least for conspiracy.
What if I write a program, say a Firefox plugin, that automatically reloads www.mastercard.com in a new tab, once a day?
Depends on why you do it. If you do it "to help increase world support for mastercard in the light of their terrible affliction" then no. If you do it to cause overload on their servers then yes. If you do it to help them but claim to be doing it to destroy them it's quite likely you will be unfairly and incorrectly arrested for damage.
What if that plugin updates the website to load from my website, but the USERS of the plugin opt to install the software and download the daily dot-com to reload.
What if the plugin is updated so that it refreshes several times a minute instead of once a day?
Did you tell them to do it? Then you are in trouble. Even if it was just a hint and you get caught. Did someone else tell them to do it? Then that someone else is guilty.
What's next? Are we going to hold security researchers responsible for malware that uses their published exploits and/or proof of concept code?
Been tried. Mostly not done. Results may depend on jurisdiction and target.
discovering the "leaders" and arresting them is not going to have any effect. IMHO, arresting everyone who participated would have little effect -- Anyone who says otherwise has never spent any time at 4chan or any other (lowercase a) anonymous forum.
I think it will have an effect. At the very least, those who weren't caught will learn to be a little more careful next time.
Building a fully flat organization with no key members is a very difficult task. I'd bet that there are a few inspired individuals setting the current direction of anonymous, they know a few people and work together and really inspire the key acts of most of the people who do any form of activity under the name of "Anonymous". Arresting these key people may not completely destroy the group and definitely won't destroy the idea, but it may completely transform what is done in the name of "Anonymous" and it may well remove a large proportion of the people who are competent enough to actually run a DDoS attack. I think that would be a pretty good definition of "senior members". Basically, the outsiders would achieve what they really want (change the way Anonymous acts) without having to attack any specific real "leaders".
To be frank the last attack on Visa seemed pretty pathetic but before that Anonymous seems to have really damaged a number of sites. The real question is; what will happen next time. If they are still able to make a serious DDoS attack against the people attacking them then we can see the operation as a failure. If they keep reducing in effectiveness we know the "leaders" have been captured. Beyond that we just get into a silly semantic discussion.
... it has always befuddled me as to why they didn't 'just use' BSD instead.
To be honest, believing exactly the argument you gave companies mostly they did until the last few years. However, you never knew about out because they didn't publish the code. The reason for this is that there is no need to and if they do release their code, their competitors can use it, so their lawyers advise them against. After a few years they either get so wildly successful (JunOS / OSX / Microsoft TCP/IP stack) that they keep their own completely proprietary branch and never help anyone else or they get abandoned (IPSO / AlchemOS / BSDi / SunOS / etc. etc.)
The thing is, that the because of the effects of copyleft, the Linux people cooperate and release code and so, even though the resources put into Linux are much less, there is less duplication and so more is achieved. This has become much more visible recently with Android and other successes and means that corporate types have begun to see copyleft as a platform which makes limited cooperation with potential competitors possible and safe.
If you are choosing a system for your own platform, this becomes a good reason to choose an AGPLv3 base as much as possible and, if you have any proprietry code, layer that separately on top. Your work on the commodity underlying components can be safely released and will move forward with the rest of the community. Whatever investment you put in will be preserved instead of becoming obsolete.
You are actually right it may well be Darl and this is unlikely to happen. If the submitter had read the Groklaw article on the subject before submitting he'd know that this is the same company which tried to buy SCO's UNIX rights before and was rejected by the court for not being serious. It's quite likely that this is some strange front for one of the SCO people and it's also likely that the court will reject this kind offer once again.
Now, I was going to go in and criticise this; maybe astroturfing needs fires, but if you, like Microsoft, are continually throwing Molotov Cocktails around you shouldn't expect too much difficulty finding one.
But, then you went off on a tangent. And you know what. You are 100% right. What is it with the idea that the search engine knows better than me. The entire reason we all switched over to Google was because, for once, here was a search engine where, if you typed in "freddie Krueger wingnut lemmings" it found the pages containing exactly all of those. The fact that Google now defaults to a mode in which it second guesses the user is a travesty of the obedient, useful servant it used to be.
The grandparent meant "opting in" to click tracking on the Bing toolbar. This applies just as much to Google as it does to Microsoft - it's ridiculous to claim otherwise. Google tracks your clicks and your browsing habits, and has never tried to claim otherwise. What do you think that onclick function on every single search result on Google searches is doing?
Did I ever claim that Google had tried to claim otherwise? Did I ever claim that Google doesn't collect clicks from those that opt in? No; I even specifically mentioned it as a thing that I would previously have considered wrong and would like to now consider wrong. The only thing that I implied was that Google does not create new results based on this. That is important because search engine placing does not leak personal data. It is statistical and, with many other inputs, not possible to link back to an individual's browsing. Microsoft, by creating new results based on user clicks is going beyond this and is leaking personal data.
Microsoft's apologists keep harping on about the things which are similar between Microsoft and Google whilst failing to address the differences. That would only be relvant if it were first shown that the differences were insignificant. In this case they are not.
You can use that to claim anything. Yahoo: "Hey, we made a search on Google.com and its top result was the same as ours! They must be copying our results! Why is every other search result different? Hey, it's not our fault we don't know the details of the inside of Google's system!"
Yes; sure; whatever you say; but not at all relevant because that's not what Google's claim is based on. Google created unique non-indexed sites that were only accessed in a special limited way and showed that they appeared in Microsoft's results and that the ranking was directly according to the ranking on google.com.
If this were an honest mistake by Microsoft they would say "sorry, we hadn't realised that we were so directly copying; you must understand we are new to this business" and just stop doing it. Instead the
Ah, here's the real meaty part. Let me call out one particular line.
they copy clicks mostly from Google, partly from Wikipedia and other key sources and not at all from random pages round the web
Citation needed much?
Nicely taken out of context (the neat trick of quoting it twice making it easy to claim blamelessness; I will probably even believe you myself if you claim that now). What I actually said was
(e.g. they copy clicks mostly from Google, partly from Wikipedia and other key sources and not at all from random pages round the web)
E.g. means "for example" and makes it clear this was speculation and the fact it's in parenthesis makes it clear that it's a subsidiary speculation of why they would have random behavior hiding other situations where there was only one clear signal as the Google results also show. Of course here's no direct citation available; I said this was my explanation; and you know the reason why it's not possible to get full details. This is all executed on Microsoft's own computers, is not published and, instead of simply confessing up and explaining what went wrong they are now indulging in attacking Google. Microsoft could have simply explained what went wrong and fixed it. The fact they don't do that speaks volumes.
It astonishes me that you realize how Microsoft was able to index these sites, and you still think they're at fault. They are tracking their users' click data—something the users implicitly opted into by installing the toolbar, just as you implicitly opt into Google parsing your emails by using Gmail, or Google tracking your clicks by using Google search, etc. The reason they were so high up is
1) Google manually manipulated their search results - something they claim never to do.
Let's examine what exact harm they did. Google ensured that the search results the manipulated would never be returned to many people. They had the manipulation designed to switch off automatically if this happend. They then had their own search engineers search. So the only people "harmed" by the manipulation were Google engineers who already knew about the test.
Clearly, this is a stupid claim. Why would anyone want to make it? Well, because Microsoft manipulates their own search results, so they want to be able to claim Google does too.
2) They then sent a group of Google engineers home to use Internet Explorer after opting-in and turning on Suggested Sites and started searching for very long tailed terms in Google and clicking on the results they wanted (btw, if 20 friends and I did this for some sites I own to improve its search ranking position, Google would penalize our site for this exact behavior).
Why would you mention "opting-in" without saying what they "opted in" for. The crucial thing here, was that there was no warning that opting in for sending data to Microsoft might lead to that data being used on their search engine. Again, this claim is more interesting in what it shows about Microsoft than Google.
3) Only 7-9% of the longest of long tail queries (gibberish) were showing the same top result on Bing as Google when there was no way Bing should be returning any results. There were other results returned by Bing for some terms outside of the top result that didn't match. Google has no explanation as to why the other 91-93% of honeypot terms didn't produce affirmative results for Bing showing the same result.
So the fact that Google doesn't know the details of the inside of Microsoft's system is their fault now?
What's worse is that there is a very clear and simple explanation for this. Microsoft knows that what it is doing is wrong. The copying is even more blatant than that (e.g. they copy clicks mostly from Google, partly from Wikipedia and other key sources and not at all from random pages round the web). Instead of making a fairer algorithm themselves they have spent effort on cloaking their copying. They only randomly introduce results and only after a random delay from the point where the results are clicked on. This is not designed to improve results by weighing up different factors (remember there aren't any other factors in these particular results). This is simply designed to hide how their search engine works.
4) Bing admits yes, we take user click and search data, harvest it and use it as a ranking factor - 1 of 1000s. (Btw, the Google Toolbar does the same exact thing people).
You people need to wake up already. If you don't see what Google is turning into, I'm sorry you're a lost cause. I can't even begin to believe that people are arguing that after you opt-in, run a coordinated SERP clicking operation, manually change your search results after you say you never have done so and have many products that do similar information harvesting that you're so blind to see the other side of this.
I've already addressed above that Google harmed only their own engineers search results. Trying to equate that to deliberate manipulation of search results for money with the aim of defrauding consumers (as in a SERP clicing operation) shows serious dishonesty.
As far as Google turning into something, Google has always been about taking personal data (your searches) and using that to provide you with advertising. Until now I really have had a serious anti-Google bias. But now I begin to see that then are just normal humans/companies like the rest of us at threat of a world dominated by Microsoft. What before looked terrible (using the contents of people's mails to choose which advert
The real explaination is that you and I don't have a clue what microsoft is thinking the difference between us is that I acknowledge that fact where as you claim to know the mind of microsoft.
I think I will refer to Adams here:
"If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands."
Microsoft's internal thinking has been well exposed in the Comes trial documents. Criminal and plagiaristic thinking is fundamental to the companies culture. It is true that it's a huge company; that many non-immoral people work there; probably people go through days at Microsoft without planning or committing crime. However, "Microsoft", a corporate body, has a clearly expressed systematic way of setting out to destroy not just competitors, but even potential future competitors such as their partners. They have clearly started planning to use patents. They are setting out to buy patents specifically to block growth of competing systems. The exact details of how Microsoft plans to compete unfairly are sometimes unknown or difficult to discern. The fact that they plan to do it is clear in advance.
Just because lots of people make political decisions based on emotion does not mean it's a good way to make decisions, from what I've seen of US politics such decision making behaviour is routinely manipulated to pursuade people to vote against their own interests.
I think I've given a number of specific facts here. If you actually read through the transcripts of Microsoft's various anti-trust trials rather than skimming the reports in the Microsoft funded media (that means most - Microsoft is a major advertiser everywhere) you will find plenty more. In what way is your claim that we cannot know Microsoft's mind more factual and less emotional than my claim that whilst their tactics are unpredictable their strategy and general state of mind is predictable and clear.
However Sir Isaac Newton wasn't trying to use his elevated vantage point to kick in the face of said giants.
You might want to look up the history of Newton and Leibnitz who (almost certainly) independently invented calculus and used each other's work for some points of development. I think the only reason Newton left most of those giants alone was that they weren't in competition with him.
On a related note, what's with all the Google-bashing recently?
I've seen some of it followed up on Grocklaw. As usual, it seems to trace back to Microsoft astro-turfers and lobby groups of various kinds. Microsoft seems to be pushing for some anti-Google anti-trust lawsuits, probably as a pre-emptive move to make any Google anti-trust moves more difficult during the various anti-patent lawsuits.
A pure marketing lead response is 100% right. The funniest thing was that the attempt to claim click fraud. If we remember click fraud is where a site owner tries to get advertising revenue by making fraudulent clicks. I don't see how Google manages to get advertising revenue from Bing. This just seems to be a case of when you get caught start slinging as much mud around randomly as you can and hope people don't notice.
In case people haven't noticed; what Google has discovered means that if you have private information leaked somewhere (e.g. a password in an SQL query) this means that bing is now pushing that straight from your browser (where it should normally be safe) onto the web. I'm surprised nobody has managed to find a bunch of interesting secret information in bing based on this. There must be some way to get it out. A good chance would be looking for unique keys in URLs or web pages and then feeding them into Bing.
This just looks so obviously terribly wrong that you can see that Microsoft really doesn't have a clue about search. No wonder they have to copy.
I think that's much closer to the hotmail idea; you have an email address but you can only use it for a limited time (in hotmail's case that's because it starts filling with spam). It's obviously more convenient if it auto expires like 10minutemail. However, the spamgourmet idea is much cleverer and you might try it. Instead of having to have an email address which expires you can keep a per-service email address. Now you can stay in touch with a service as long as you like. Maybe one mail, maybe several. You can also delete the mail address wherever you want.
You can also do functions almost identical to 10minute mail; in Spamgourmet's case you can just limit the maximum number of mails to one - it isn't even valid for nine more minutes than needed; After that all mails go automatically in the bin. The best thing about this is that you don't even have to go to the page to register the email address. You can encode the limitation straight into the email address you give the service you are signing up for.
They even have a neat moto: "The Molotov Cocktail for the war on spam"
Slashdot Mirror
The one who manages to solve my programming problems. If he can do that then I don't care if he speaks like a pirate.
Why not learn something about some of the proposed systems which you're certain you could subvert effortlessly?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting#Cryptographic_verification
Because, as with quantum cryptography and most other security measures, the measure is theoretically perfect and practically irrelevant. You may be able to verify that your vote matches your number, but the system can give several people the same number without any way for them to realise. You may be able to verify perfectly, but that can be used to indimidate you.
This comment seems to sum up the arrogant stupidity of so many posters here so well. I'll grant the poster below that probably the US army could nuke away the red army (though remember China has nukes too, and has been specifically targeting US military systems for a while, so we can assume they have at least some secret systems to do so effectively). The idea that a bunch of gun nuts interfering is going to do anything except slow down the bullets from mini-guns is so stupid that the only comparable stupidity is that of people telling the country that invented toilet paper, most of the basic vegetables you eat, gunpowder that you need for your wars and a bunch of other things that you just expect to use without thought that they own you for your "intellectual property" because "we say so".
China's development is likely to slow down lots; They have environmental problems beyond belief which are going to mess up their economy whether they try to ignore them or not. Building them up into a magical dragon about to eat the world is not going to help you in dealing with this. On the other hand, just a little bit of respect for your fellow intelligent human beings would really really help you to develop into some kind of civilization. Failing to underestimate your potential opponents will also help you avoid problems like the Battle of Unsan. If you could show some kind of consistent respect for the Chinese at the same time as not continually selling out your industrial secrets and industrial future for cheap plastic toys.
Mod AC parent up. Anke Domscheit-Berg really does appear to be working for Microsoft and married to him. Interesting.
Well; we have the source;. If the FO i FOSS is to ever mean something, this is the stage at which we should fork and start contributing as much as possible under a license which Microsoft will never steal (e.g. the AGPLv3). This is going to be interesting and hard to kill.
hmmm.. I would seriously not be surprised if the entire idea of this linkage is to create a patent toll organisation. Expect Nokia and MS to spin off a body for patent licensing together under the cover of cooperating Windows 7 phone. The idea that Windows Phone 7 which is commercial disaster for Microsoft already is going to help Nokia is laughable. The idea that they could both together get all their competition banned is not so stupid.
Elop comes from Microsoft of exactly the era after they had come up with SCO.
yes.
On most phones there is some insulator between you and the antenna. This means that you simply can't grip "where the antenna is located" without taking the phone apart. You can't "touch" the antenna. You have a plastic case and inside that the antenna.
Let's be absolutely clear about this. It's all a matter of proportion. It's possible to set up a test where the phone is exactly on the limit of it's reception strength and then put a small pebble metres from the phone, but close to the base station and have that reduce the signal strength enough to cause the phone to fail. It is always possible to influence the signal with your body. The difference with the iPhone is the direct coupling which allows a massively greater drop in signal strength than could every be achieved on a different phone.
Yes, it's possible to fake demos where the signal strength happens to be just above some threshold. Yes most of the demos online are unscientific (you can't use "bars" as a measure of signal strength. Yes, the iPhone still has a specific problem that it shouldn't have.
All phones have a "death grip" that drops the signal.
Except that that's total crap and has been gone over on slashdot so often that I refuse to even give you a link. The recap is; all phones can have the signal physically blocked by putting bits of your body between the antenna and the signal source. This causes some signal loss, but is difficult to notice under normal circumstances. The iPhone has an external non-insulated antenna which, when you touch it, get's detuned. This causes a larger signal strength drop than in almost any circumstance on a normal phone. The solution; hold it differently or buy an insulating cover which separates your finger from the iPhone. If you have insualtion then you will go back to the same level as problem as a normal phone.
People who either deny it or claim that it's the end of the world are both wrong.
Your response seems to be to a strange bunch of things I didn't say. I shall pick some random points that I can understand enough to make a useful reply to.
This is complete nonsense. Prefer the GPL? Okay, release your modifications under the GPL. Its been done over and over again. You think every utility in a linux distro was written from scratch when bsd versions were out there? of course not.
I just didn't say any of the things you seem to be answering here. Maybe I wasn't clear?
And what's with the Sun hate?
This is one of the most bizzare questions I have ever been asked. I thought Sun was great. I loved SunOS. I even came to accept Solaris. What are you even replying to? I mentioned SunOS as abandoned, but the reason for that was not Sun's fault. However, if BSD had been GPL licensed then SunOS likely would have too and could have continued till today; probably as part of the standard BSD system.
SunOS may have died, but a few people might still be using a little thing called NFS. Sun contributed TONS back to the open source community, and naming a project here and there that they kept closed won't change that.
A bunch of things where the fact they were released under the BSD license ended up benefitting Microsoft and killing Sun. In the end with Java they ended up with a mad bureaucracy in the JCP. Had they just been consistently GPL from the beginning I think they would have had fewer problems.
If I didn't realize people would take you seriously, it would be absolutely HILARIOUS that you've singled out Android as the great FOSS success, and yet complain about Darwin being proprietary in the same breath.
I can show you several examples of Android based independent OS releases. I believe that OpenDarwin "died a lonely death". (please feel free to correct me if there is someone else who has released a consumer ready Darwin based OS). What this means is that in practice normal people can have homebrew versions of android and can develop on them and cannot do the same with Darwin.
Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about in regards to press of BSD vs GPL/Linux... When iPhone took over the world, we weren't hearing what a vindication it was of BSD. But when anything Linux-based gets slightly popular, even trivial nonsense like basic WiFi routers, roll out the screaming fanbois...
I think the difference is that normally the Linux devices mean there's a chance for further interesting hacking (see Linksys L series routers for example) whilst the BSD based systems basically just end up as embedded, unalterable systems where the best hope is to jailbreak. Who cares what's inside if you can't touch it? I think this is, to be honest the biggest problem with Linux being stuck with GPLv2. There's a definite space for someone to launch a hardcore AGPLv3 OS on which web/cloud based solutions could be safely released.
Actually Android is a perfect example. The GPLv2 is just on the edge of being a strong enough copyleft license; sometimes good enough, often not. Unfortunately, Linus has repeatedly weakened it further, both by supporting Tivioisation and by supporting linking binary blobs. Now that weakness is coming back to haunt Linux. Android is not just failing to contribute it's actually sucking part of the life from Linux.
Before I start; you are making the fundamental technical person's standard mistake of thinking that law deals with actions rather than intent. It's a very different way of thinking and really matters
What if I say online: "Everyone Point your browsers at: www.mastercard.com" -- Am I now a DDOS perpetrator?
Probably yes. At least for conspiracy.
Well, I just did -- Conspiracy to do what?
Conspiracy to deliberately overload the site.
I think the Slashdot effect is more powerful than many of the LOIC attacks -- Slashdot posts links to websites; In essence this is exactly saying, "point your browser at: example.com". Surely you don't mean that when example.com goes down due to a slashdot article link all of us visitors are breaking the law? How do you distinguish a traffic from a Slashdot visitor repeatedly clicking an article link that points to a downed website from LOIC attack traffic that may be occurring at the same time? You don't.
Check if someone posted a link on Slashdot. If not it wasn't related. Contact, randomly, a sample of the people who just visited the page. Ask them why they did it. 90% will just tell you in anything approaching a police interview. Once you have the main group pointing towards one web site, examine that site. Do most people post there to cause problems or for a good reason? Was there an alternative explanation for the posting? Raid the guy who posted the link and some of his friends. Did they discuss doing damage to mastercard or not? If so, you have your case. If not, use the drugs you will find in at least one guys house to get him to confess it was done deliberately. Use that confession to get a warrant on the poster. Start spying on him. Try to get him on tape saying he did it. Etc. etc.
N.B. If you post a link to Slashdot because you want to take down someone's site, that is a DoS attack. If you make the exact same posting because you want to advertise their service, that is a friendly act!
What if I do it for no reason at all? Can you really prove that such a plugin has a purpose other than to open a tab and reload it?
The phrase you really want here is "prove beyond reasonable doubt" and in fact that means "persuade a jury to accept voting for your guilt if I tell them it has to be beyond reasonable doubt". The first answer is, after this slashdot posting, it will be dead easy.
What if I do it so that people can run a traffic test on their own websites? This is what LOIC was designed to do... Guns designed to hunt ducks can be used on other objects -- It's not the gun maker's fault when a person is killed by firearms. It's not the security researcher's fault when someone takes their tools and uses them to cause harm. It's not Slashdot's fault that a website has insufficient bandwidth to support the visitor flood a frontpage article causes. It's not the creator of the LOIC tool's fault that it was used to DDOS someone.
These are all examples of "plausible deniability". This is a good strategy for getting away with things, but it's not nearly as good as most people think. Most of the time, people claim they did things for one reason and somehow or other it's shown that that wasn't true. E.g. you say "I did it because I love the mastercard corporation and want to see that their website is up all the time", all it takes is an ex-girlfriend who remembers some rant you gave about the evils of the company and you will be completely screwed. It is true, however, that even Richard Nixon managed to avoid impeachment by using this strategy.
Reformat you hard drive, then run over pedestrians with your car.
There, now go do that and try to sue me for damaging your har
What if I say online: "Everyone Point your browsers at: www.mastercard.com" -- Am I now a DDOS perpetrator?
Probably yes. At least for conspiracy.
What if I write a program, say a Firefox plugin, that automatically reloads www.mastercard.com in a new tab, once a day?
Depends on why you do it. If you do it "to help increase world support for mastercard in the light of their terrible affliction" then no. If you do it to cause overload on their servers then yes. If you do it to help them but claim to be doing it to destroy them it's quite likely you will be unfairly and incorrectly arrested for damage.
What if that plugin updates the website to load from my website, but the USERS of the plugin opt to install the software and download the daily dot-com to reload. What if the plugin is updated so that it refreshes several times a minute instead of once a day?
Did you tell them to do it? Then you are in trouble. Even if it was just a hint and you get caught. Did someone else tell them to do it? Then that someone else is guilty.
What's next? Are we going to hold security researchers responsible for malware that uses their published exploits and/or proof of concept code?
Been tried. Mostly not done. Results may depend on jurisdiction and target.
discovering the "leaders" and arresting them is not going to have any effect. IMHO, arresting everyone who participated would have little effect -- Anyone who says otherwise has never spent any time at 4chan or any other (lowercase a) anonymous forum.
I think it will have an effect. At the very least, those who weren't caught will learn to be a little more careful next time.
Why is it that hackers can't resist toying with people or leaving riddles or boasting about their deeds on forums?
Maybe in every group there are always some idiots? I guess those are the people who tend to get caught most?
Building a fully flat organization with no key members is a very difficult task. I'd bet that there are a few inspired individuals setting the current direction of anonymous, they know a few people and work together and really inspire the key acts of most of the people who do any form of activity under the name of "Anonymous". Arresting these key people may not completely destroy the group and definitely won't destroy the idea, but it may completely transform what is done in the name of "Anonymous" and it may well remove a large proportion of the people who are competent enough to actually run a DDoS attack. I think that would be a pretty good definition of "senior members". Basically, the outsiders would achieve what they really want (change the way Anonymous acts) without having to attack any specific real "leaders".
To be frank the last attack on Visa seemed pretty pathetic but before that Anonymous seems to have really damaged a number of sites. The real question is; what will happen next time. If they are still able to make a serious DDoS attack against the people attacking them then we can see the operation as a failure. If they keep reducing in effectiveness we know the "leaders" have been captured. Beyond that we just get into a silly semantic discussion.
... it has always befuddled me as to why they didn't 'just use' BSD instead.
To be honest, believing exactly the argument you gave companies mostly they did until the last few years. However, you never knew about out because they didn't publish the code. The reason for this is that there is no need to and if they do release their code, their competitors can use it, so their lawyers advise them against. After a few years they either get so wildly successful (JunOS / OSX / Microsoft TCP/IP stack) that they keep their own completely proprietary branch and never help anyone else or they get abandoned (IPSO / AlchemOS / BSDi / SunOS / etc. etc.)
The thing is, that the because of the effects of copyleft, the Linux people cooperate and release code and so, even though the resources put into Linux are much less, there is less duplication and so more is achieved. This has become much more visible recently with Android and other successes and means that corporate types have begun to see copyleft as a platform which makes limited cooperation with potential competitors possible and safe.
If you are choosing a system for your own platform, this becomes a good reason to choose an AGPLv3 base as much as possible and, if you have any proprietry code, layer that separately on top. Your work on the commodity underlying components can be safely released and will move forward with the rest of the community. Whatever investment you put in will be preserved instead of becoming obsolete.
You are actually right it may well be Darl and this is unlikely to happen. If the submitter had read the Groklaw article on the subject before submitting he'd know that this is the same company which tried to buy SCO's UNIX rights before and was rejected by the court for not being serious. It's quite likely that this is some strange front for one of the SCO people and it's also likely that the court will reject this kind offer once again.
Now, I was going to go in and criticise this; maybe astroturfing needs fires, but if you, like Microsoft, are continually throwing Molotov Cocktails around you shouldn't expect too much difficulty finding one.
But, then you went off on a tangent. And you know what. You are 100% right. What is it with the idea that the search engine knows better than me. The entire reason we all switched over to Google was because, for once, here was a search engine where, if you typed in "freddie Krueger wingnut lemmings" it found the pages containing exactly all of those. The fact that Google now defaults to a mode in which it second guesses the user is a travesty of the obedient, useful servant it used to be.
The grandparent meant "opting in" to click tracking on the Bing toolbar. This applies just as much to Google as it does to Microsoft - it's ridiculous to claim otherwise. Google tracks your clicks and your browsing habits, and has never tried to claim otherwise. What do you think that onclick function on every single search result on Google searches is doing?
Did I ever claim that Google had tried to claim otherwise? Did I ever claim that Google doesn't collect clicks from those that opt in? No; I even specifically mentioned it as a thing that I would previously have considered wrong and would like to now consider wrong. The only thing that I implied was that Google does not create new results based on this. That is important because search engine placing does not leak personal data. It is statistical and, with many other inputs, not possible to link back to an individual's browsing. Microsoft, by creating new results based on user clicks is going beyond this and is leaking personal data.
Microsoft's apologists keep harping on about the things which are similar between Microsoft and Google whilst failing to address the differences. That would only be relvant if it were first shown that the differences were insignificant. In this case they are not.
You can use that to claim anything. Yahoo: "Hey, we made a search on Google.com and its top result was the same as ours! They must be copying our results! Why is every other search result different? Hey, it's not our fault we don't know the details of the inside of Google's system!"
Yes; sure; whatever you say; but not at all relevant because that's not what Google's claim is based on. Google created unique non-indexed sites that were only accessed in a special limited way and showed that they appeared in Microsoft's results and that the ranking was directly according to the ranking on google.com.
If this were an honest mistake by Microsoft they would say "sorry, we hadn't realised that we were so directly copying; you must understand we are new to this business" and just stop doing it. Instead the
Ah, here's the real meaty part. Let me call out one particular line.
Citation needed much?
Nicely taken out of context (the neat trick of quoting it twice making it easy to claim blamelessness; I will probably even believe you myself if you claim that now). What I actually said was
(e.g. they copy clicks mostly from Google, partly from Wikipedia and other key sources and not at all from random pages round the web)
E.g. means "for example" and makes it clear this was speculation and the fact it's in parenthesis makes it clear that it's a subsidiary speculation of why they would have random behavior hiding other situations where there was only one clear signal as the Google results also show. Of course here's no direct citation available; I said this was my explanation; and you know the reason why it's not possible to get full details. This is all executed on Microsoft's own computers, is not published and, instead of simply confessing up and explaining what went wrong they are now indulging in attacking Google. Microsoft could have simply explained what went wrong and fixed it. The fact they don't do that speaks volumes.
It astonishes me that you realize how Microsoft was able to index these sites, and you still think they're at fault. They are tracking their users' click data—something the users implicitly opted into by installing the toolbar, just as you implicitly opt into Google parsing your emails by using Gmail, or Google tracking your clicks by using Google search, etc. The reason they were so high up is
1) Google manually manipulated their search results - something they claim never to do.
Let's examine what exact harm they did. Google ensured that the search results the manipulated would never be returned to many people. They had the manipulation designed to switch off automatically if this happend. They then had their own search engineers search. So the only people "harmed" by the manipulation were Google engineers who already knew about the test.
Clearly, this is a stupid claim. Why would anyone want to make it? Well, because Microsoft manipulates their own search results, so they want to be able to claim Google does too.
2) They then sent a group of Google engineers home to use Internet Explorer after opting-in and turning on Suggested Sites and started searching for very long tailed terms in Google and clicking on the results they wanted (btw, if 20 friends and I did this for some sites I own to improve its search ranking position, Google would penalize our site for this exact behavior).
Why would you mention "opting-in" without saying what they "opted in" for. The crucial thing here, was that there was no warning that opting in for sending data to Microsoft might lead to that data being used on their search engine. Again, this claim is more interesting in what it shows about Microsoft than Google.
3) Only 7-9% of the longest of long tail queries (gibberish) were showing the same top result on Bing as Google when there was no way Bing should be returning any results. There were other results returned by Bing for some terms outside of the top result that didn't match. Google has no explanation as to why the other 91-93% of honeypot terms didn't produce affirmative results for Bing showing the same result.
So the fact that Google doesn't know the details of the inside of Microsoft's system is their fault now?
What's worse is that there is a very clear and simple explanation for this. Microsoft knows that what it is doing is wrong. The copying is even more blatant than that (e.g. they copy clicks mostly from Google, partly from Wikipedia and other key sources and not at all from random pages round the web). Instead of making a fairer algorithm themselves they have spent effort on cloaking their copying. They only randomly introduce results and only after a random delay from the point where the results are clicked on. This is not designed to improve results by weighing up different factors (remember there aren't any other factors in these particular results). This is simply designed to hide how their search engine works.
4) Bing admits yes, we take user click and search data, harvest it and use it as a ranking factor - 1 of 1000s. (Btw, the Google Toolbar does the same exact thing people).
You people need to wake up already. If you don't see what Google is turning into, I'm sorry you're a lost cause. I can't even begin to believe that people are arguing that after you opt-in, run a coordinated SERP clicking operation, manually change your search results after you say you never have done so and have many products that do similar information harvesting that you're so blind to see the other side of this.
I've already addressed above that Google harmed only their own engineers search results. Trying to equate that to deliberate manipulation of search results for money with the aim of defrauding consumers (as in a SERP clicing operation) shows serious dishonesty.
As far as Google turning into something, Google has always been about taking personal data (your searches) and using that to provide you with advertising. Until now I really have had a serious anti-Google bias. But now I begin to see that then are just normal humans/companies like the rest of us at threat of a world dominated by Microsoft. What before looked terrible (using the contents of people's mails to choose which advert
The real explaination is that you and I don't have a clue what microsoft is thinking the difference between us is that I acknowledge that fact where as you claim to know the mind of microsoft.
I think I will refer to Adams here:
"If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands."
Microsoft's internal thinking has been well exposed in the Comes trial documents. Criminal and plagiaristic thinking is fundamental to the companies culture. It is true that it's a huge company; that many non-immoral people work there; probably people go through days at Microsoft without planning or committing crime. However, "Microsoft", a corporate body, has a clearly expressed systematic way of setting out to destroy not just competitors, but even potential future competitors such as their partners. They have clearly started planning to use patents. They are setting out to buy patents specifically to block growth of competing systems. The exact details of how Microsoft plans to compete unfairly are sometimes unknown or difficult to discern. The fact that they plan to do it is clear in advance.
Just because lots of people make political decisions based on emotion does not mean it's a good way to make decisions, from what I've seen of US politics such decision making behaviour is routinely manipulated to pursuade people to vote against their own interests.
I think I've given a number of specific facts here. If you actually read through the transcripts of Microsoft's various anti-trust trials rather than skimming the reports in the Microsoft funded media (that means most - Microsoft is a major advertiser everywhere) you will find plenty more. In what way is your claim that we cannot know Microsoft's mind more factual and less emotional than my claim that whilst their tactics are unpredictable their strategy and general state of mind is predictable and clear.
However Sir Isaac Newton wasn't trying to use his elevated vantage point to kick in the face of said giants.
You might want to look up the history of Newton and Leibnitz who (almost certainly) independently invented calculus and used each other's work for some points of development. I think the only reason Newton left most of those giants alone was that they weren't in competition with him.
On a related note, what's with all the Google-bashing recently?
I've seen some of it followed up on Grocklaw. As usual, it seems to trace back to Microsoft astro-turfers and lobby groups of various kinds. Microsoft seems to be pushing for some anti-Google anti-trust lawsuits, probably as a pre-emptive move to make any Google anti-trust moves more difficult during the various anti-patent lawsuits.
A pure marketing lead response is 100% right. The funniest thing was that the attempt to claim click fraud. If we remember click fraud is where a site owner tries to get advertising revenue by making fraudulent clicks. I don't see how Google manages to get advertising revenue from Bing. This just seems to be a case of when you get caught start slinging as much mud around randomly as you can and hope people don't notice.
In case people haven't noticed; what Google has discovered means that if you have private information leaked somewhere (e.g. a password in an SQL query) this means that bing is now pushing that straight from your browser (where it should normally be safe) onto the web. I'm surprised nobody has managed to find a bunch of interesting secret information in bing based on this. There must be some way to get it out. A good chance would be looking for unique keys in URLs or web pages and then feeding them into Bing.
This just looks so obviously terribly wrong that you can see that Microsoft really doesn't have a clue about search. No wonder they have to copy.
I think that's much closer to the hotmail idea; you have an email address but you can only use it for a limited time (in hotmail's case that's because it starts filling with spam). It's obviously more convenient if it auto expires like 10minutemail. However, the spamgourmet idea is much cleverer and you might try it. Instead of having to have an email address which expires you can keep a per-service email address. Now you can stay in touch with a service as long as you like. Maybe one mail, maybe several. You can also delete the mail address wherever you want. You can also do functions almost identical to 10minute mail; in Spamgourmet's case you can just limit the maximum number of mails to one - it isn't even valid for nine more minutes than needed; After that all mails go automatically in the bin. The best thing about this is that you don't even have to go to the page to register the email address. You can encode the limitation straight into the email address you give the service you are signing up for. They even have a neat moto: "The Molotov Cocktail for the war on spam"