First, violating a Terms of Services agreement isn't considered theft of service, and it's hardly criminal (It might be a matter for civil law of course). Second your whole premise assumes people have any clue what their computer is doing. If you asked the average WoW player (who isn't also a file sharer) whether they use P2P networks, they'd almost certainly say no.
WoW, a commercial and legal product from a respected name in a legitimate industry, has asked permission to update itself. Of course the user allowed it. They want the latest version of the game so they can play.
Two points. First, they are supposedly referring these students to the police for legal action... Which creates all kinds of problems when the traffic isn't, you know, illegal. Second, in dorms universities deliberately and for their own reasons choose to take on the role of private ISP for students. They typically provide a level of QOS similar to that of a cable or DSL provider. Whether students are playing games on their own time in their own dorm room is their own damned business.
My guess is it has something to do with "Small college in Georgia" and the fact that the network administrator for said college probably thinks you just said something about McDonald's best selling sandwiches. Luckily for them the students in question probably have no idea what you're talking about either. So it all works out I guess. Until someone does use MAC spoofing, and they screw some poor kid.
I dunno, there are a LOT of WoW and CoD players out there. Especially on a college network. With Cataclysm set to release in a month, and CoD just released (Hence needing to be patched most likely, games being what they are) it seems to me that there's probably a lot of legitimate P2P traffic on a university network right now. Gigs and gigs worth per client in WoW's case. I think my computer has downloaded something like 5 or 6 gigabytes worth of patches and preloads (They're making Cataclysm available for direct download rather than making you go to the store and buy a copy) in the last month or two with another 3-4 gigs expected before Dec 7. Then probably another 500MB to a gig in patches to fix the stuff that didn't scale like they thought it would.
You're aware that different systems have different levels of efficiency, yes? Bodies are similar. Some are extremely efficient, others less so, some are extremely inefficient. Now I'm not making excuses here, I probably weigh about 50 pounds more than I should, but I'm well aware it's my own fault. I exercise, but also eat more calories than I should. On the other hand I know people who eat far worse diets than I do, *and* don't exercise who have a lower BMI. Why? I can't say specifically, but my guess would be a less efficient metabolism. If my body is absorbing 3 out of every 4 calories I eat, and yours is absorbing 2 out every 4, you'll have an easier time keeping weight off than I will.
I knew a guy in college... skinny as a rail (I was too back then, but I was an active martial artist and runner, whereas his physical activity tended toward "beer lifting"). His diet consisted primarily of Spam and beer. He consumed both in quantities that that often left me wondering whether his body contained some sort of small wormhole. He never gained a pound. He also couldn't jog a 440 before he was on the ground panting and looking ready to throw up. He wasn't healthy, he was skinny.
Now I'm not trying to defend the "never met a Twinkie they didn't like" crowd. Plenty of people are fat because they eat to much and don't exercise enough, no doubt. All bodies are not created equal though. While there are "abnormal" people who have problems that literally prevent them from losing weight, it's pretty uncommon. The range of "normal" is pretty broad though. It's often much harder for some people to lose weight than others even within the "normal" range.
Company trade secrets, financial information, etc should *never* be hosted on a 3rd party site. Emails, right or wrong, will have that information...or at least internal emails will. Of course, once you go to gmail there's no such thing as internal email.
I see this general idea posted a lot, but in actual fact real corporations and governments frequently trust such information to third parties. Contractors and subcontractors are privy not only to the government secrets that they are working with to perform their duties, but each other's internal documents. Companies like Iron Mountain based their entire business model on archiving, protecting, and, under the proper conditions, destroying other company's internal documents.
The Fortune 50 company I used to work for contracted their entire corporate IT infrastructure to Dell. Dell provided workstations, IT help desk, and ran all the internal and external servers. Below the level of the CTO pretty much every person in the IT department actually worked for Dell.
Security companies like Brinks provide all the physical security including guards and cameras for lots of companies. The guards who work for our security contractor have more access to our building than I do as a regular employee.
In short, most companies of any size already trust a good portion of their internal information to other companies on a regular and ongoing basis. How is this different? You write the contract to ensure severe penalties for the third party in the event the information is deliberately compromised, less serve penalties for accidental compromise and you do business.
I dunno. I was a Linux Systems Administrator for a fortune 50 company. I'm now a Linux Systems administrator for the Federal Government. In both cases we also had limited use of Macs too. You didn't see that 10 years ago. I'll grant you "Faster than equatorial glaciers" may be hyperbole, but the monoculture is disappearing (Windows isn't disappearing by any means, just the monoculture).
To a certain extent it's also somewhat of a moot point anyway. If people are using Macs or Linux at home that's still impacting malware authors. In fact it's impacting them worse in some respects. They count on the unpatched boxes in ma and pa's bedroom for a botnet vector. Smartphones are also a growing presence on the 'Net. They're not hugely important *yet* but at the rate they're going they will be.
So yeah, for the time being you can still feel safe that 9/10 clients are Windows (which is still down a lot from 9.7/10). Smart criminals, just like smart companies, look ahead though. If trends continue as they are, 10 years from now it might be 7/10 clients (With the rest split between Macs, some Linux, and lots of mobile) . 10 years after that? Who knows?
On a per server basis, maybe, but once you pay for a year of Red Hat support you're done. No per seat licenses. It's like $200 (more now? I don't know.. I don't actually handle the money part) to "license" a server for a year (really for a year's worth of support). That's it. Got 2 users? $200. Got 2000 users? $200. The support is good too. Got a problem? Open a ticket. They'll pretty much solve it for you, no per incident charges.
As Sibling states you need Samba 4 (Hopefully) to act as a directory server to Microsoft clients. Macs work fine with OpenLDAP though. I've Authed Mac clients against Red Hat and SuSE servers, and this was several years ago.
There's a pretty significant difference between standard gun safety and marksmanship training and the kind of combat training I'm talking about. Few civilians not involved in law enforcement or private security get that kind of training. Even private security people don't always get it. I personally spent three solid days preparing for and eventually making multiple runs through a live fire shoot house with a 4 man stack, and by the standards of the real combat MOS troops I'd be considered somewhere between "Likely to get someone else killed" and "Has the most basic level of competence".
Those guys spend weeks doing this kind of thing with regular practice and refresher training.
Well if you care to search back far enough (2004-2005) you can find my posts right here on Slashdot talking about my deployment. I guess it's not proof, but it's as good as you'll get on an Internet forum. I suppose it's possible that I falsified a year and half of posts (subtly of course, it's not like I mention it every post or anything) just so I could appeal to authority several years later, but probably not likely. I'll admit that it goes more to "I've used deadly weapons in real life" than anything else, soldiers don't carry concealed and muggings weren't exactly a big worry....
I have black belts in Tae kwon do and Shaolin-do (which is a completely bogus martial arts "tradition", but a reasonably effective fighting style). My Tae kwon do instructor was a former cop, so the instruction tended to the more... practical. Especially in the self defense focused classes.
I'll never say that it's completely impossible that you'll ever find yourself in a position to use that gun. It would be stupid for me to claim that. I will say that the number of situation where you are likely to be able to use it to effectively defend yourself is not going to be high. You are probably more likely to get yourself hurt or killed trying to use it at an inappropriate time.
I'm not trying to insult you personally here. I don't know you any more than you know me. Maybe you've had police, military, or private security training. Maybe you're just smarter than the average bear and won't make "typical" mistakes. For you, personally, your stance may make perfect sense. But for the the average use case of the average person with no particular training or experience... A concealed firearm is probably not ever going to help them and is perhaps slightly more likely to be harmful to them.
Just my opinion. I've already made claim to knowing perhaps a bit more than the average person about the topic, but I'll never say I'm an expert. What I do know is pretty old. I haven't actively studied martial arts in nearly a decade and I'm several years out of the military. It's no skin off my nose if you disagree, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't actively accuse me of lying.
I often see this postulated, but as someone who has served in the military, in a combat zone, and has a couple of black belts, I've never seen concealed firearms as being particularly effective defense against muggings. Typically speaking, if you're being mugged, the bad guy has his gun out, trained on you. He's also nervous as fuck (since muggers tend to be the lowest level of street criminal). In the time it takes to draw, aim, and fire a pistol you'll be dead. As someone who has taught self defense, and spent more than his fair share time in self defense classes, the most common advice given to people regarding muggings is "give them your money". Something on the order of 95% or 98% of muggers (it's been a while since I taught this stuff) just want the money and they leave. The chances that you've encountered one of the other 5% are much smaller than the chances that you'll survive an attempt to defend yourself against an armed opponent.
Now for home defense there's a completely different case. Typically in that situation you have time to get your gun out and put yourself on at least equal footing with the intruder. There's *some* argument for the use of firearms in home defense situations, but in personal defense situations typically by the time you realize you need the gun it's too late.
And then go to jail. I think that's the bit they are trying to avoid. You see the first time you kill someone you go to jail. The one and only exception being if you can prove that person was an active threat to your life or the life of someone else. Use of deadly force in crime prevention is limited to cases where the crime is placing someone in active danger or (in some states) break-ins to your own home (not someone elses).
Personally, I'm just glad to see a reasonable and thoughtful *discussion* of what "Cloud Computing" is and how it could be (or might not be) useful; rather than the usual Slashdot knee jerk hatred for the entire concept. I'm sure that if I scroll down far enough I'll find a screed about how awful Cloud Computing is, and how no companies or governments would ever give up control of their data this way (despite the fact that many do); but for now I'm pretty happy to see people talking about the usefulness of particular services and what the formal definition of the tern could or should be.
If you can prove that you thought you were downloading something else you'd probably win. It would be a Pyrrhic victory in that case, because you would have spent a fortune in legal fees, but you would probably win. Same deal here except that the number of instances and the fact that Telstra no doubt has lawyers on retainer means the victory wouldn't be Pyrrhic. You didn't do anything wrong. Telstra didn't do anything wrong. In both cases I suspect a court would agree with that... It's just a question of whether it's worth it to defend yourself or not.
You're a responsible manufacturer, you've informed your retailers that a) you're using GPLed code in your device and b) you're providing the source/license information on your website. What if you were a less responsible manufacturer. You not only didn't provide the service you do in publishing the source/license, you didn't even tell your retailers that you're using GPLed code. Is your argument that the retailers have a responsibility to rip apart every device they sell looking for potential copyright or GPL violations? Assuming (as seems reasonable) that Telstra didn't know there was GPLed code on the devices they can't really be held liable for failure to comply with the GPL.
They made a good faith assumption that the manufacturer was taking care of licensing requirements. Now that they know, an argument can be made that they are responsible in the future (and it looks like they are moving to comply), but I don't see any reasonable argument for how they were out of compliance in the past.
I know it's a bit facetious, but think if we took that attitude with other things. Forget about cars, planes, or power plants (Which would kill thousands of people on every new release), even other types of software are never treated this way. For all that people joke about never buying a Microsoft product till after the first service pack, the average Microsoft Office or Windows releases is a freaking dream compared to most "release" games. Hell even other *game* companies prove that it can be done better. I'm not going to make the laughable statement that Blizzard games are released bug free, but compared to this they might as well be.
This guy gave what he intended to be a *positive* review, because the game *only* crashed every 2.5 hours, only cost him around an hour of progress because of quest bugs, and only occasionally had clipping bugs that could result in invisible enemies killing you. He was happy with the overall quality. He's seen much worse apparently. I can't think of a single other industry: hardware, software, real or virtual where that would be considered not just "Annoying but acceptable", but actually pretty good. Oh. And he got it after the *first* patch. So it was *worse* when it was released.
I'm not a huge gamer anymore, but it still upsets me to see what appears to be an almost total lack of QC in the gaming industry. It annoys the Hell out me that if I decide I *do* want to go to the store an get a game, I have to first figure out which ones are least buggy, and then probably download patch. Assuming I picked a game popular enough that it actually got patched. Is it really so much to expect that you can go to the store and buy a game without worrying whether it will be an unplayable mess because it happened to be too new, or to unpopular to patch?
Of course I'm still not an Australian IP attorney, so my opinion is largely immaterial. I'm just using logic and and my (limited) understanding of US IP law.
I'd accept that now that they've been made aware of the infringement they have a responsibility to make the information available. I don't know that there's any case for any sort of retroactive damages or anything like that. There's a legal difference between ignorance of the law (no excuse), and ignorance of what you're doing (typically considered excusable). If I'm selling stolen goods in my shop, but can make a reasonable case that I didn't know they were stolen, I'm typically not held responsible. I can't keep selling the items in question of course, but I'm not going to be fined or sent to jail. In this case, if Telstra makes a good faith effort to correct the problem (which it seems like they are doing), I don't think they did anything "wrong" per se.
Ignorance of the law is indeed no excuse (though it is often a mitigating factor), but in this case I'm not sure Telstra has broken a law. They sold and/or rented these devices to their customers as a reseller. Are they responsible for GPL compliance or is the original manufacturer? They slapped their brand on the things, but had nothing to do with design or manufacture. I honestly have no idea what their legal responsibility is, and I doubt anyone but an Austrailian IP attorney could offer a valid opinion. To my mind this is the OEM's problem not the reseller. After all we don't go after Best Buy if some product on their shelves is violating the GPL.
This is precisely why they aren't asking you. Look, asking the average person for their opinion on the function, safety, or usefulness of a particle collider is like walking down the street and asking a random person for algorithm advice on your latest programming project. The chances that s/he will have even the vaguest idea what you're talking about are slim. The chances that s/he will understand your question well enough to answer you are slimmer still. The chance that they will be able to offer a helpful and correct answer answer is probably one in a million. Now consider that there are probably 100 knowledgeable programmers for every knowledgeable particle physicist.
Now personally, I know very little about particle physics. I also know very little about brakes. When I take my car to the mechanic and he tell me my brakes are fine, I take his work for it. The chance exists that he's wrong and I'll go careening off a mountain, but that's the nature of a specialist society. When a whole community of particle physicists tells me that particle colliders are safe, I take their word for it too.
It's also worth pointing out that "Mini Big Bang" is in quotes. Almost as if they wanted to indicate "This isn't exactly right, but it's evocative and saves headline space". Even after all these years the level of pedantry on this site still amazes me sometimes.
I dunno I can see both sides. On the one hand, it's really good that Microsoft would release anything Open Source. On the other hand people are justifiably suspicious of a company that goes out its way to demonstrate what a fool's chance you're taking by using Open Source... then releases Open Source software. Of course there's always the people who won't be happy with Microsoft no matter what they do simply because they're Microsoft, and the people who are incapable of seeing any gray between the black and the white and won't be happy until Microsoft simply admits they were wrong all along and releases *everything* as Open Source. The latter two groups not withstanding, even for a reasonable OSS advocate Microsoft would have to do a little more than this to really earn any sort of trust.
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Probably not well. He says he doesn't do math. It's fair enough really. Everyone can't be good at everything.
First, violating a Terms of Services agreement isn't considered theft of service, and it's hardly criminal (It might be a matter for civil law of course). Second your whole premise assumes people have any clue what their computer is doing. If you asked the average WoW player (who isn't also a file sharer) whether they use P2P networks, they'd almost certainly say no.
WoW, a commercial and legal product from a respected name in a legitimate industry, has asked permission to update itself. Of course the user allowed it. They want the latest version of the game so they can play.
Two points. First, they are supposedly referring these students to the police for legal action... Which creates all kinds of problems when the traffic isn't, you know, illegal. Second, in dorms universities deliberately and for their own reasons choose to take on the role of private ISP for students. They typically provide a level of QOS similar to that of a cable or DSL provider. Whether students are playing games on their own time in their own dorm room is their own damned business.
My guess is it has something to do with "Small college in Georgia" and the fact that the network administrator for said college probably thinks you just said something about McDonald's best selling sandwiches. Luckily for them the students in question probably have no idea what you're talking about either. So it all works out I guess. Until someone does use MAC spoofing, and they screw some poor kid.
I dunno, there are a LOT of WoW and CoD players out there. Especially on a college network. With Cataclysm set to release in a month, and CoD just released (Hence needing to be patched most likely, games being what they are) it seems to me that there's probably a lot of legitimate P2P traffic on a university network right now. Gigs and gigs worth per client in WoW's case. I think my computer has downloaded something like 5 or 6 gigabytes worth of patches and preloads (They're making Cataclysm available for direct download rather than making you go to the store and buy a copy) in the last month or two with another 3-4 gigs expected before Dec 7. Then probably another 500MB to a gig in patches to fix the stuff that didn't scale like they thought it would.
You're aware that different systems have different levels of efficiency, yes? Bodies are similar. Some are extremely efficient, others less so, some are extremely inefficient. Now I'm not making excuses here, I probably weigh about 50 pounds more than I should, but I'm well aware it's my own fault. I exercise, but also eat more calories than I should. On the other hand I know people who eat far worse diets than I do, *and* don't exercise who have a lower BMI. Why? I can't say specifically, but my guess would be a less efficient metabolism. If my body is absorbing 3 out of every 4 calories I eat, and yours is absorbing 2 out every 4, you'll have an easier time keeping weight off than I will.
I knew a guy in college... skinny as a rail (I was too back then, but I was an active martial artist and runner, whereas his physical activity tended toward "beer lifting"). His diet consisted primarily of Spam and beer. He consumed both in quantities that that often left me wondering whether his body contained some sort of small wormhole. He never gained a pound. He also couldn't jog a 440 before he was on the ground panting and looking ready to throw up. He wasn't healthy, he was skinny.
Now I'm not trying to defend the "never met a Twinkie they didn't like" crowd. Plenty of people are fat because they eat to much and don't exercise enough, no doubt. All bodies are not created equal though. While there are "abnormal" people who have problems that literally prevent them from losing weight, it's pretty uncommon. The range of "normal" is pretty broad though. It's often much harder for some people to lose weight than others even within the "normal" range.
Company trade secrets, financial information, etc should *never* be hosted on a 3rd party site. Emails, right or wrong, will have that information...or at least internal emails will. Of course, once you go to gmail there's no such thing as internal email.
I see this general idea posted a lot, but in actual fact real corporations and governments frequently trust such information to third parties. Contractors and subcontractors are privy not only to the government secrets that they are working with to perform their duties, but each other's internal documents. Companies like Iron Mountain based their entire business model on archiving, protecting, and, under the proper conditions, destroying other company's internal documents.
The Fortune 50 company I used to work for contracted their entire corporate IT infrastructure to Dell. Dell provided workstations, IT help desk, and ran all the internal and external servers. Below the level of the CTO pretty much every person in the IT department actually worked for Dell.
Security companies like Brinks provide all the physical security including guards and cameras for lots of companies. The guards who work for our security contractor have more access to our building than I do as a regular employee.
In short, most companies of any size already trust a good portion of their internal information to other companies on a regular and ongoing basis. How is this different? You write the contract to ensure severe penalties for the third party in the event the information is deliberately compromised, less serve penalties for accidental compromise and you do business.
I dunno. I was a Linux Systems Administrator for a fortune 50 company. I'm now a Linux Systems administrator for the Federal Government. In both cases we also had limited use of Macs too. You didn't see that 10 years ago. I'll grant you "Faster than equatorial glaciers" may be hyperbole, but the monoculture is disappearing (Windows isn't disappearing by any means, just the monoculture).
To a certain extent it's also somewhat of a moot point anyway. If people are using Macs or Linux at home that's still impacting malware authors. In fact it's impacting them worse in some respects. They count on the unpatched boxes in ma and pa's bedroom for a botnet vector. Smartphones are also a growing presence on the 'Net. They're not hugely important *yet* but at the rate they're going they will be.
So yeah, for the time being you can still feel safe that 9/10 clients are Windows (which is still down a lot from 9.7/10). Smart criminals, just like smart companies, look ahead though. If trends continue as they are, 10 years from now it might be 7/10 clients (With the rest split between Macs, some Linux, and lots of mobile) . 10 years after that? Who knows?
On a per server basis, maybe, but once you pay for a year of Red Hat support you're done. No per seat licenses. It's like $200 (more now? I don't know.. I don't actually handle the money part) to "license" a server for a year (really for a year's worth of support). That's it. Got 2 users? $200. Got 2000 users? $200. The support is good too. Got a problem? Open a ticket. They'll pretty much solve it for you, no per incident charges.
As Sibling states you need Samba 4 (Hopefully) to act as a directory server to Microsoft clients. Macs work fine with OpenLDAP though. I've Authed Mac clients against Red Hat and SuSE servers, and this was several years ago.
There's a pretty significant difference between standard gun safety and marksmanship training and the kind of combat training I'm talking about. Few civilians not involved in law enforcement or private security get that kind of training. Even private security people don't always get it. I personally spent three solid days preparing for and eventually making multiple runs through a live fire shoot house with a 4 man stack, and by the standards of the real combat MOS troops I'd be considered somewhere between "Likely to get someone else killed" and "Has the most basic level of competence".
Those guys spend weeks doing this kind of thing with regular practice and refresher training.
Well if you care to search back far enough (2004-2005) you can find my posts right here on Slashdot talking about my deployment. I guess it's not proof, but it's as good as you'll get on an Internet forum. I suppose it's possible that I falsified a year and half of posts (subtly of course, it's not like I mention it every post or anything) just so I could appeal to authority several years later, but probably not likely. I'll admit that it goes more to "I've used deadly weapons in real life" than anything else, soldiers don't carry concealed and muggings weren't exactly a big worry....
I have black belts in Tae kwon do and Shaolin-do (which is a completely bogus martial arts "tradition", but a reasonably effective fighting style). My Tae kwon do instructor was a former cop, so the instruction tended to the more... practical. Especially in the self defense focused classes.
I'll never say that it's completely impossible that you'll ever find yourself in a position to use that gun. It would be stupid for me to claim that. I will say that the number of situation where you are likely to be able to use it to effectively defend yourself is not going to be high. You are probably more likely to get yourself hurt or killed trying to use it at an inappropriate time.
I'm not trying to insult you personally here. I don't know you any more than you know me. Maybe you've had police, military, or private security training. Maybe you're just smarter than the average bear and won't make "typical" mistakes. For you, personally, your stance may make perfect sense. But for the the average use case of the average person with no particular training or experience... A concealed firearm is probably not ever going to help them and is perhaps slightly more likely to be harmful to them.
Just my opinion. I've already made claim to knowing perhaps a bit more than the average person about the topic, but I'll never say I'm an expert. What I do know is pretty old. I haven't actively studied martial arts in nearly a decade and I'm several years out of the military. It's no skin off my nose if you disagree, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't actively accuse me of lying.
I often see this postulated, but as someone who has served in the military, in a combat zone, and has a couple of black belts, I've never seen concealed firearms as being particularly effective defense against muggings. Typically speaking, if you're being mugged, the bad guy has his gun out, trained on you. He's also nervous as fuck (since muggers tend to be the lowest level of street criminal). In the time it takes to draw, aim, and fire a pistol you'll be dead. As someone who has taught self defense, and spent more than his fair share time in self defense classes, the most common advice given to people regarding muggings is "give them your money". Something on the order of 95% or 98% of muggers (it's been a while since I taught this stuff) just want the money and they leave. The chances that you've encountered one of the other 5% are much smaller than the chances that you'll survive an attempt to defend yourself against an armed opponent.
Now for home defense there's a completely different case. Typically in that situation you have time to get your gun out and put yourself on at least equal footing with the intruder. There's *some* argument for the use of firearms in home defense situations, but in personal defense situations typically by the time you realize you need the gun it's too late.
And then go to jail. I think that's the bit they are trying to avoid. You see the first time you kill someone you go to jail. The one and only exception being if you can prove that person was an active threat to your life or the life of someone else. Use of deadly force in crime prevention is limited to cases where the crime is placing someone in active danger or (in some states) break-ins to your own home (not someone elses).
Personally, I'm just glad to see a reasonable and thoughtful *discussion* of what "Cloud Computing" is and how it could be (or might not be) useful; rather than the usual Slashdot knee jerk hatred for the entire concept. I'm sure that if I scroll down far enough I'll find a screed about how awful Cloud Computing is, and how no companies or governments would ever give up control of their data this way (despite the fact that many do); but for now I'm pretty happy to see people talking about the usefulness of particular services and what the formal definition of the tern could or should be.
If you can prove that you thought you were downloading something else you'd probably win. It would be a Pyrrhic victory in that case, because you would have spent a fortune in legal fees, but you would probably win. Same deal here except that the number of instances and the fact that Telstra no doubt has lawyers on retainer means the victory wouldn't be Pyrrhic. You didn't do anything wrong. Telstra didn't do anything wrong. In both cases I suspect a court would agree with that... It's just a question of whether it's worth it to defend yourself or not.
You're a responsible manufacturer, you've informed your retailers that a) you're using GPLed code in your device and b) you're providing the source/license information on your website. What if you were a less responsible manufacturer. You not only didn't provide the service you do in publishing the source/license, you didn't even tell your retailers that you're using GPLed code. Is your argument that the retailers have a responsibility to rip apart every device they sell looking for potential copyright or GPL violations? Assuming (as seems reasonable) that Telstra didn't know there was GPLed code on the devices they can't really be held liable for failure to comply with the GPL.
They made a good faith assumption that the manufacturer was taking care of licensing requirements. Now that they know, an argument can be made that they are responsible in the future (and it looks like they are moving to comply), but I don't see any reasonable argument for how they were out of compliance in the past.
I know it's a bit facetious, but think if we took that attitude with other things. Forget about cars, planes, or power plants (Which would kill thousands of people on every new release), even other types of software are never treated this way. For all that people joke about never buying a Microsoft product till after the first service pack, the average Microsoft Office or Windows releases is a freaking dream compared to most "release" games. Hell even other *game* companies prove that it can be done better. I'm not going to make the laughable statement that Blizzard games are released bug free, but compared to this they might as well be.
This guy gave what he intended to be a *positive* review, because the game *only* crashed every 2.5 hours, only cost him around an hour of progress because of quest bugs, and only occasionally had clipping bugs that could result in invisible enemies killing you. He was happy with the overall quality. He's seen much worse apparently. I can't think of a single other industry: hardware, software, real or virtual where that would be considered not just "Annoying but acceptable", but actually pretty good. Oh. And he got it after the *first* patch. So it was *worse* when it was released.
I'm not a huge gamer anymore, but it still upsets me to see what appears to be an almost total lack of QC in the gaming industry. It annoys the Hell out me that if I decide I *do* want to go to the store an get a game, I have to first figure out which ones are least buggy, and then probably download patch. Assuming I picked a game popular enough that it actually got patched. Is it really so much to expect that you can go to the store and buy a game without worrying whether it will be an unplayable mess because it happened to be too new, or to unpopular to patch?
Of course I'm still not an Australian IP attorney, so my opinion is largely immaterial. I'm just using logic and and my (limited) understanding of US IP law.
I'd accept that now that they've been made aware of the infringement they have a responsibility to make the information available. I don't know that there's any case for any sort of retroactive damages or anything like that. There's a legal difference between ignorance of the law (no excuse), and ignorance of what you're doing (typically considered excusable). If I'm selling stolen goods in my shop, but can make a reasonable case that I didn't know they were stolen, I'm typically not held responsible. I can't keep selling the items in question of course, but I'm not going to be fined or sent to jail. In this case, if Telstra makes a good faith effort to correct the problem (which it seems like they are doing), I don't think they did anything "wrong" per se.
Actually to keep things even moderately on topic it should be Australia. Just sayin'.
Ignorance of the law is indeed no excuse (though it is often a mitigating factor), but in this case I'm not sure Telstra has broken a law. They sold and/or rented these devices to their customers as a reseller. Are they responsible for GPL compliance or is the original manufacturer? They slapped their brand on the things, but had nothing to do with design or manufacture. I honestly have no idea what their legal responsibility is, and I doubt anyone but an Austrailian IP attorney could offer a valid opinion. To my mind this is the OEM's problem not the reseller. After all we don't go after Best Buy if some product on their shelves is violating the GPL.
This is precisely why they aren't asking you. Look, asking the average person for their opinion on the function, safety, or usefulness of a particle collider is like walking down the street and asking a random person for algorithm advice on your latest programming project. The chances that s/he will have even the vaguest idea what you're talking about are slim. The chances that s/he will understand your question well enough to answer you are slimmer still. The chance that they will be able to offer a helpful and correct answer answer is probably one in a million. Now consider that there are probably 100 knowledgeable programmers for every knowledgeable particle physicist.
Now personally, I know very little about particle physics. I also know very little about brakes. When I take my car to the mechanic and he tell me my brakes are fine, I take his work for it. The chance exists that he's wrong and I'll go careening off a mountain, but that's the nature of a specialist society. When a whole community of particle physicists tells me that particle colliders are safe, I take their word for it too.
It's also worth pointing out that "Mini Big Bang" is in quotes. Almost as if they wanted to indicate "This isn't exactly right, but it's evocative and saves headline space". Even after all these years the level of pedantry on this site still amazes me sometimes.
I dunno I can see both sides. On the one hand, it's really good that Microsoft would release anything Open Source. On the other hand people are justifiably suspicious of a company that goes out its way to demonstrate what a fool's chance you're taking by using Open Source... then releases Open Source software. Of course there's always the people who won't be happy with Microsoft no matter what they do simply because they're Microsoft, and the people who are incapable of seeing any gray between the black and the white and won't be happy until Microsoft simply admits they were wrong all along and releases *everything* as Open Source. The latter two groups not withstanding, even for a reasonable OSS advocate Microsoft would have to do a little more than this to really earn any sort of trust.