So, did Cryptome rip off this story from the National Review, or vice versa? Although the Cryptome one is longer, much of the text reads the same.
At the bottom of the National Review article it mentioned that a congressman would be watching to thwart any attempts at unanimous consent for this bill, so hopefully that will not be an issue. It's depressing to see Leahy and Hatch's names on this bill - I thought they had more integrity than to try to pass of this attack on civil liberties as an innocuous feel-good bill.
Hey, I've got no problem with optional configurability; that's what allows my wife and I to use the same machine in very different ways.
But the original poster was arguing that simple users can modify the way that Linux operates, and in my experience, simple users don't want to do so. The Gnome desktop preferences tool can be configured to only display preferences relative to the experience level of the user, which is a good start. But to change really anything around requires some understanding of what those changes would do, and to most folks like Grandma the risk of not being able to log onto AOL and chat with the grandkids far outweighs the potential usability advance from making the desktop font bigger, etc.
I guess my point is that there are some people who are uncomfortable with any sort of configuration, and will avoid it at all costs. I don't think Linux has made configuring your machine easier for these people, and I don't hold out much hope for anything else to do so in the near future. Once we have natural language voice recognition help systems built into all machines, then maybe some sort of semi-smart digital assistant could ask about some configuration options and get feedback from Grandma.
No, wait, that's what that damn paperclip does. Never mind:)
No, but on the other hand if you're "in public", there's a certain understanding that people will see you, and they may even talk to you or bump into you on the street. None of those things constitute criminal actions.
Likewise, if you're hooked up to the public network, you can expect to sometimes get packets from other machines. If you don't like the packets, drop them on the floor. If you don't want to waste time doing so, get a firewall (public street example: a Popemobile) and let the firewall drop unwanted packets on the floor.
There's a difference between attacking your machine, and just port scanning it. I could see allowing prosecution for sending you a virus, or trying to crack one of the services you're running, but a port scan is not the same thing. I don't think you can really complain until your computing resources have actually been misappropriated. If you've just been port scanned (and not flooded) then that hasn't happened yet.
Besides, wasn't the fact that "simple users can modify the OS" the main mantra behind Linux????
I thought so.
I don't know about that - I like the high level of configurability, but I'm a power user. People like my wife, who want things to "just work", don't change any of the settings of the desktop.
Gnome is simpler for a new user to modify than most window managers IMHO, since it has a GUI setup tool (which is almost, but not quite, internally logically consistent). But most "simple users" don't want to see that configurability and don't get comfortable with it for quite a while.
Yes, I believe that was my point: "it is sad that although the majority of Americans did not vote Republican, a Republican President was elected".
Although on a second reading of my post, I think I could see how you could read it in the opposite light: "it is sad that the majority of Americans did not vote Republican". Although that's not my viewpoint, of course:)
No, I think he really means "property", in the sense that Windows and Back Street Boys albums are property production, whereas Linux and Chris Johnson mp3s (just fr'instance) are non-property. Although proprietariness is a close cousin to property - maybe just close enough to use the wrong word for emphasis?
Um, you do realize that it was a quote, not the actual article, right? How could we have a ZDNet tech article without quoting a MS shill who's aiming at the lowest common denominator?
This is just the real world - as long as MS's standards are open and not proprietry I have no
particular problem with it.
I must say you're getting better - I made it all the way to the third paragraph before detecting the troll and checking to see if it was you. Now if only today's moderators would pay similar attention...
strcpy exists because in some environments you can trust your input to be null-terminated. It's a performance feature AND a security hole, depending on how you use it.
I have to take exception to the comment about documenting the C library API too - just in terms of the number of users since its creation and the number of books that have been written on it, it's hard to imagine a more thoroughly documented API. Theo pointed out that the big problem is not documenting the API, but rather coders abusing the API through sloppiness or lack of understanding of some of the subtler points of it.
I will agree that a more well-thought-out API would have few to none of the opportunities for coding error because there would be fewer subtle/confusing uses of the API (my personal favorite example being realloc(3)), but again it's a tradeoff versus the performance-enhancing tricks you can do with a richer API. Until the rewards of known-secure code are high enough, people will continue to code for performance in insecure languages with insecure libraries, and security will suffer from buffer overruns, etc.
Re:reverse engineering
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 1
True, reverse engineering (especially since the DMCA) is supposed to be compatibility-oriented. But there's still a question of what your goal is - for example, it might be reasonable for me to reverse engineer a Quake III client in an effort to understand the client-server protocol that is used (for example) and create a client that is compatible with an official Quake III server.
Or I could be interested in producing a BIOS that is compatible with the market-leading IBM PC BIOS so that.... oh wait, never mind.
Re:reverse engineering
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 1
Because when you create a new document in Microsoft Word you start with nothing. When you
start a new game with Quake, all the artwork and levels and everything copyrighted by id is
already there.
Not necessarily - you have a blank Word document, with Microsoft fonts, perhaps some clipart, etc. already provided. I agree that iD has copyright to the levels, character and level artwork, etc., but each game you play is a new creation from those base materials using the game engine as your tool. The New York Times is copyrighted through-and-through too, but that doesn't mean they would own the copyright if I made paper-mache animals out of it, for example.
It's a little fuzzier for games, since the same publisher provides all of the tools and all of the pieces that you can use when creating, but this is no different than buying a paint-by-numbers kit at the store IMHO.
Not that any of this has stopped the posting of Quake screenshots, of course...
I think that's a false dichotomy - birds can go around windmills, but salmon can't go around dams. How many birds are really killed by windmills every year? I bet more are killed by hunters, pollution, or even getting hit by cars while enjoying some choice roadkill.
The third promise every game obtains from the user is that they will not try to reverse engineer
or modify the product in any way using the program they've received. Keeping this protection is
at the core of what differentiates owning the software from licensing it. If software companies
ever had to transfer ownership of their work when they sell it, it would be impossible to prevent
people from taking it apart and figuring out how it ticks. But because these are license
agreements, and intellectual property ownership continues in the law to reside with the
company, game companies can prevent rivals from stealing their software innovations for their
own purposes.
What this ignores is that reverse engineering falls within the bounds of fair use. The publishers of a game can retain ownership all they want, but reverse engineering is supported under U.S. law (and others too, I'm sure). Thus many EULAs are misrepresenting the law (at worst) or attempting to get you to agree to give up rights which you would normally have (at best).
It's too bad for software publishers that users have such rights, but it's unethical for them to attempt to strip away a user's rights or trick users in this manner.
Don't get me started on screenshots, either - if you own the copyright to a document you created with Microsoft Word, why don't you own the copyright to a screenshot of a game you created with Quake or Rainbow Six? In both cases you're starting from the default document/game provided with the software, but you add and subtract things creatively from the document/game until you have something that's truly unique. This will only become more of an issue as games become less linear and start to dynamically generate entire worlds for you to explore.
If you're reading this forum, you're probably already open-minded enough (OK, maybe with a few exceptions) for that conversation not to be a problem. Now imagine the same conversation occurring in rural Kansas, or in Utah... (no offense to the many non-homophobic Kansans and Utahians (?) reading, but you have to admit you don't live in the most cosmopolitan areas of the country).
Good points. In fact, I really see the web going the search engine/finder route, because although there's a quasi-hierarchy of servers, there's no defined structure on each server. In a few years it's going to be much easier to ask a search engine (voice activated, of course) to find you something than it will be two go to a site and click around looking for stuff. So in some cases the hierarchical approach has already begun to fail, since users have to re-learn the hierarchy on each web site and there's no standardization. The only problem is that then you're only as good as your search engine and database, at least until we develop some autonomous agents to go find stuff for us.
The fact that I am much more like your roommate inspired my previous rant, as you probably could tell.
Y'know, I've wondered this for a few weeks now and I'm finally going to ask: How the hell do you people get your posts to show up in that god-awful font? It is truly jarring to be reading along with the usual proportional/. font and then hit a fixed-font message - it makes me think I've hit a troll ('cause the letters sort of look like all-caps compared to a proportional font).
We're stuck in a rut of old operating system concepts of directories ect
when most of the world just can not handle the complexity, with all of the computing power now
there has to be a better way. For all the people who will just reply, you want to throw out
directories?!?, maybe not, but at least throw out the concept.
I've heard this argument before and remain amazed by it. How else do you propose to organize large quantities of data without some sort of hierarchical directory system? Humans have been organizing relationships in terms of hierarchical systems for thousands of years (granted, most of the time they applied their systems to the royal family tree or the organization of the Church).
Every once in a while some interface radical comes along and says that people are too stupid for hierarchical data organization. I say that people are too stupid to handle data without organization. If you want to handle a lot of data, you need to divide it up somehow, and hierarchical (directory-oriented) organization works great for that.
I'm not sure that I agree with your reasoning, although it does appear that the original comment was referring to South Dakota.
Taking your example, you can say "I went to the mall" and it means the mall in your town. If you say "I went to the Mall", then it means you went to that monster one in Minnesota (or, depending on context, maybe the big parklike area in downtown Washington, DC). So even though the capitalized, proper version of the noun means one specific place, the non-capitalized but specific use of the term means something like "the closest example of a mall".
So if there were bad lands in your state, you could say "We went through the badlands" and not be talking about South Dakota. You could even say "We went through the badlands of Nevada", if Nevada had any badlands of course. It's only when you say "We went through the Badlands of Nevada" that you are definitely incorrect.
Yes, I don't want to get back to work, why do you ask?
I see too many limitations in end to end networking in anything but small groups.
So you don't hold out too much hope for this new-fangled "In-ter-net" thing, do you? Client-server is end-to-end; you have two machines at the end of a dumb pair of copper wires, a dumb piece of fiber, or maybe some dumb RF. Maybe you need routers or switches in between, but those are made just "smart" enough to do their jobs and no smarter.
This reminds me of an article that was posted to/. a while bag in praise of dumb fiber rather than the "smart networks" that the QoS folks/telcos continue to push. Here's the link.
Slashdot Mirror
So, did Cryptome rip off this story from the National Review, or vice versa? Although the Cryptome one is longer, much of the text reads the same.
At the bottom of the National Review article it mentioned that a congressman would be watching to thwart any attempts at unanimous consent for this bill, so hopefully that will not be an issue. It's depressing to see Leahy and Hatch's names on this bill - I thought they had more integrity than to try to pass of this attack on civil liberties as an innocuous feel-good bill.
Hey, I've got no problem with optional configurability; that's what allows my wife and I to use the same machine in very different ways.
But the original poster was arguing that simple users can modify the way that Linux operates, and in my experience, simple users don't want to do so. The Gnome desktop preferences tool can be configured to only display preferences relative to the experience level of the user, which is a good start. But to change really anything around requires some understanding of what those changes would do, and to most folks like Grandma the risk of not being able to log onto AOL and chat with the grandkids far outweighs the potential usability advance from making the desktop font bigger, etc.
I guess my point is that there are some people who are uncomfortable with any sort of configuration, and will avoid it at all costs. I don't think Linux has made configuring your machine easier for these people, and I don't hold out much hope for anything else to do so in the near future. Once we have natural language voice recognition help systems built into all machines, then maybe some sort of semi-smart digital assistant could ask about some configuration options and get feedback from Grandma.
No, wait, that's what that damn paperclip does. Never mind :)
No, but on the other hand if you're "in public", there's a certain understanding that people will see you, and they may even talk to you or bump into you on the street. None of those things constitute criminal actions.
Likewise, if you're hooked up to the public network, you can expect to sometimes get packets from other machines. If you don't like the packets, drop them on the floor. If you don't want to waste time doing so, get a firewall (public street example: a Popemobile) and let the firewall drop unwanted packets on the floor.
There's a difference between attacking your machine, and just port scanning it. I could see allowing prosecution for sending you a virus, or trying to crack one of the services you're running, but a port scan is not the same thing. I don't think you can really complain until your computing resources have actually been misappropriated. If you've just been port scanned (and not flooded) then that hasn't happened yet.
I don't know about that - I like the high level of configurability, but I'm a power user. People like my wife, who want things to "just work", don't change any of the settings of the desktop.
Gnome is simpler for a new user to modify than most window managers IMHO, since it has a GUI setup tool (which is almost, but not quite, internally logically consistent). But most "simple users" don't want to see that configurability and don't get comfortable with it for quite a while.
LOL! I sense a new .signature coming on...
Good point - I should have been more precise, but somehow "majority" makes more of an effect than just "plurality".
Yes, I believe that was my point: "it is sad that although the majority of Americans did not vote Republican, a Republican President was elected".
Although on a second reading of my post, I think I could see how you could read it in the opposite light: "it is sad that the majority of Americans did not vote Republican". Although that's not my viewpoint, of course :)
The sad thing is that the majority of Americans didn't...
No, I think he really means "property", in the sense that Windows and Back Street Boys albums are property production, whereas Linux and Chris Johnson mp3s (just fr'instance) are non-property. Although proprietariness is a close cousin to property - maybe just close enough to use the wrong word for emphasis?
Wow, about halfway through your screed I had to stop and check if you were KisstheBlade. Bravo, best troll of the week IMHO.
I mean, come on, this is like the third or fourth story in as many days! Or at least it seems like. Can we have a plex86 section to put these in?
Um, you do realize that it was a quote, not the actual article, right? How could we have a ZDNet tech article without quoting a MS shill who's aiming at the lowest common denominator?
I must say you're getting better - I made it all the way to the third paragraph before detecting the troll and checking to see if it was you. Now if only today's moderators would pay similar attention...
strcpy exists because in some environments you can trust your input to be null-terminated. It's a performance feature AND a security hole, depending on how you use it.
I have to take exception to the comment about documenting the C library API too - just in terms of the number of users since its creation and the number of books that have been written on it, it's hard to imagine a more thoroughly documented API. Theo pointed out that the big problem is not documenting the API, but rather coders abusing the API through sloppiness or lack of understanding of some of the subtler points of it.
I will agree that a more well-thought-out API would have few to none of the opportunities for coding error because there would be fewer subtle/confusing uses of the API (my personal favorite example being realloc(3)), but again it's a tradeoff versus the performance-enhancing tricks you can do with a richer API. Until the rewards of known-secure code are high enough, people will continue to code for performance in insecure languages with insecure libraries, and security will suffer from buffer overruns, etc.
True, reverse engineering (especially since the DMCA) is supposed to be compatibility-oriented. But there's still a question of what your goal is - for example, it might be reasonable for me to reverse engineer a Quake III client in an effort to understand the client-server protocol that is used (for example) and create a client that is compatible with an official Quake III server.
Or I could be interested in producing a BIOS that is compatible with the market-leading IBM PC BIOS so that .... oh wait, never mind.
Not necessarily - you have a blank Word document, with Microsoft fonts, perhaps some clipart, etc. already provided. I agree that iD has copyright to the levels, character and level artwork, etc., but each game you play is a new creation from those base materials using the game engine as your tool. The New York Times is copyrighted through-and-through too, but that doesn't mean they would own the copyright if I made paper-mache animals out of it, for example.
It's a little fuzzier for games, since the same publisher provides all of the tools and all of the pieces that you can use when creating, but this is no different than buying a paint-by-numbers kit at the store IMHO.
Not that any of this has stopped the posting of Quake screenshots, of course...
I think that's a false dichotomy - birds can go around windmills, but salmon can't go around dams. How many birds are really killed by windmills every year? I bet more are killed by hunters, pollution, or even getting hit by cars while enjoying some choice roadkill.
What this ignores is that reverse engineering falls within the bounds of fair use. The publishers of a game can retain ownership all they want, but reverse engineering is supported under U.S. law (and others too, I'm sure). Thus many EULAs are misrepresenting the law (at worst) or attempting to get you to agree to give up rights which you would normally have (at best).
It's too bad for software publishers that users have such rights, but it's unethical for them to attempt to strip away a user's rights or trick users in this manner.
Don't get me started on screenshots, either - if you own the copyright to a document you created with Microsoft Word, why don't you own the copyright to a screenshot of a game you created with Quake or Rainbow Six? In both cases you're starting from the default document/game provided with the software, but you add and subtract things creatively from the document/game until you have something that's truly unique. This will only become more of an issue as games become less linear and start to dynamically generate entire worlds for you to explore.
If you're reading this forum, you're probably already open-minded enough (OK, maybe with a few exceptions) for that conversation not to be a problem. Now imagine the same conversation occurring in rural Kansas, or in Utah... (no offense to the many non-homophobic Kansans and Utahians (?) reading, but you have to admit you don't live in the most cosmopolitan areas of the country).
Good points. In fact, I really see the web going the search engine/finder route, because although there's a quasi-hierarchy of servers, there's no defined structure on each server. In a few years it's going to be much easier to ask a search engine (voice activated, of course) to find you something than it will be two go to a site and click around looking for stuff. So in some cases the hierarchical approach has already begun to fail, since users have to re-learn the hierarchy on each web site and there's no standardization. The only problem is that then you're only as good as your search engine and database, at least until we develop some autonomous agents to go find stuff for us.
The fact that I am much more like your roommate inspired my previous rant, as you probably could tell.
Y'know, I've wondered this for a few weeks now and I'm finally going to ask: How the hell do you people get your posts to show up in that god-awful font? It is truly jarring to be reading along with the usual proportional /. font and then hit a fixed-font message - it makes me think I've hit a troll ('cause the letters sort of look like all-caps compared to a proportional font).
What gives with that, anyway?
I've heard this argument before and remain amazed by it. How else do you propose to organize large quantities of data without some sort of hierarchical directory system? Humans have been organizing relationships in terms of hierarchical systems for thousands of years (granted, most of the time they applied their systems to the royal family tree or the organization of the Church).
Every once in a while some interface radical comes along and says that people are too stupid for hierarchical data organization. I say that people are too stupid to handle data without organization. If you want to handle a lot of data, you need to divide it up somehow, and hierarchical (directory-oriented) organization works great for that.
Actually, yours sounds closer.
I'm not sure that I agree with your reasoning, although it does appear that the original comment was referring to South Dakota.
Taking your example, you can say "I went to the mall" and it means the mall in your town. If you say "I went to the Mall", then it means you went to that monster one in Minnesota (or, depending on context, maybe the big parklike area in downtown Washington, DC). So even though the capitalized, proper version of the noun means one specific place, the non-capitalized but specific use of the term means something like "the closest example of a mall".
So if there were bad lands in your state, you could say "We went through the badlands" and not be talking about South Dakota. You could even say "We went through the badlands of Nevada", if Nevada had any badlands of course. It's only when you say "We went through the Badlands of Nevada" that you are definitely incorrect.
Yes, I don't want to get back to work, why do you ask?
So you don't hold out too much hope for this new-fangled "In-ter-net" thing, do you? Client-server is end-to-end; you have two machines at the end of a dumb pair of copper wires, a dumb piece of fiber, or maybe some dumb RF. Maybe you need routers or switches in between, but those are made just "smart" enough to do their jobs and no smarter.
This reminds me of an article that was posted to /. a while bag in praise of dumb fiber rather than the "smart networks" that the QoS folks/telcos continue to push. Here's the link.