Of course, they don't have a bunch of clueless cretins poking around in the registry editor, so yes, there will be "customers" who find problems they didn't discover.
Why not? If they're trying to produce a foolproof, easy to use but yet secure OS, shouldn't their testers include some fools? I'm really not being sarcastic here - some of the biggest bugs are found by people who don't know how to use the product and just try what looks like a good approach.
With any product, this can easily blow up in your face. On a *nix box, typing random text into files in/etc isn't a recommended approach to system administration. But MS sells a lot on the basis of ease of use and customer familiarity with Windows. They should be testing their products with users who have no clues and are just depending on ease of use to get them through. We'll see how secure the OS is under those circumstances.
Good point - in thinking back to this morning's drive to work, they usually announce it as "National Public Radio broadcast on Chicago Public Radio WBEZ". So it's a local station which is public (funded some by the government? but mostly by contributions) that buys NPR programming. They also trade local content back and forth like TV networks, though - if news happens in Illinois, NPR usually has a local WBEZ reporter on the scene.
So we should distinguish between any bias which may be present in the national portion of the programming, versus the local portion. In that sense, it may indeed seem in some areas that NPR is leftward-leaning, because a national program will tend towards what is the average sentiment across the entire country, and when you broadcast this in a very conservative section of the country, it will seem out of place. That doesn't necessarily make them leftists, it just makes them more leftist than their audience.
To satisfy my curiosity, could you cite specific examples of left-wing propaganda on NPR? Perhaps this is different between local stations, but I've been impressed by the balance of opposing viewpoints on NPR in my area (WBEZ in Chicago). Off the top of my head, here are some right-wing topics which they've discussed favorably in the past few months:
they broadcast all of the Republican primary debates, which I couldn't even get on TV around here
favorable coverage of the campaigns of both Elizabeth Dole and John McCain
normally unfavorable coverage of Chicago's mainly Democratic administration (although in local politics it's harder to categorize things into left vs. right)
For all I know, your local NPR station could be very leftist, but I don't think you can categorize them all that way.
One comment about copyright: it was originally created for authors, not for those who owned printing presses. Read any history of Shakespeare, for example, and you'll hear a lot about unscrupulous printers who print and sell an author's works without due compensation. For the people that already had printing presses (granted, an expensive proposition) life before copyright was 100% profit except for costs of materials and distribution, because you didn't have to pay the content creator (if you could get away without doing so). Copyright protected content creators by providing them with a legal tool to protect their creations. This wasn't as good financially for the printers, but on the other hand it encouraged content creation because authors knew they were less likely to be ripped off. Over time this made publishing a much bigger industry than it otherwise might have been.
I agree with most of the points that you made - we have arrived in an era where everyone has an electronic printing press, but yet we still need to preserve the legal balance between content producers and content distributors that encourages content creation. This is going to be new and interesting because now everyone can be a content distributor.
I'll echo that non-trouble report: K6-2/350, 2.2.14, Mandrake 6.1 ==> no problems. I did get kernel oopses at the end of the init 0 sequence with the 2.2.13ish kernel that came with the 6.1 release, but after moving to 2.2.14 even that works fine. My only complaint is that Linux+X+KDE w/o any extra themage+Netscape and no servers running still uses about 56M of my 64M of memory, so it swaps a little too much. But another 64 or 128 that I've been planning on should fix that.
I don't see how you can use this news item to infer that Mandrake continues to become less stable. The post to which you're replying describes this as alpha software; there's no reason to think that the released Mandrake 7 will be as bad.
Actually, the encryption was a trade secret, and thus it is fair game for anyone who figures it out to distribute it. If they had patented the DVD encryption process, then it wouldn't have taken nearly as long to get a decoder written! It does sound like the reverse-engineering wasn't completely "clean-room", but on the other hand apparently that isn't an issue in the country where DeCSS was written. Can a case be made against those who live in a country with restrictions on reverse engineering, but distribute code RE'd by someone in an unrestricted country? That seems to be the plaintiff's strongest legal leg.
I wonder if they might also make the argument that they have the copyright to the encryption keys themselves, and thus the redistribution of the keys would be illegal in most countries. That would force DVD viewers to crack the keys for themselves, rather than getting a key list distributed with DeCSS. In a way, this would be security through legal obscurity - it wouldn't stop the spread of unauthorized DVD viewers, but it might slow it a bit.
Contents of this post are subject to my uncertain recollection of all the facts of this case - flame away!
Woops - you're right, I should read more closely before replying. Of course the X Consortium deserves the domain - they're the first thing that I think of. It's surprising that the domain didn't get grabbed for a porn site first, though!
I don't know about 2600.com or hp.com, but I've heard that one-letter domains were only allowed for a short time before they were disallowed. The x.com folks probably registered it during that short window.
The Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched from ships off the shore of Iraq. An ICBM could be launched from the U.S. and hit Iraq, but I don't think it would have quite that level of accuracy (as with hand grenades, close is good enough). No ICBMs were fired at Iraq to my knowledge, though.
I like the idea of a "smart probe". I'm not sure whether the Mars Global Surveyor photos (currently the best we have, I think) are of high enough quality for that sort of positioning - you really want very accurate terrain measurements down to the level of the smallest object that you can't land a probe on. And you can still be wrecked by dust storms during your landing sequence, which happened to some Soviet mars probes.
also, the actions of a few should not be seen as representative of the entire company, any more than the postings of a few excited newbies on these sorts of discussions should be seen as the general attitude of "open source people."
But that's exactly it - when you distribute a press release with "Sun Microsystems, Inc" on the letterhead, it is a representation of the entire company. Postings on/. or elsewhere don't represent the entire Linux community, because there is no legal association which defines the entire Linux community. But Sun is a legal entity and they should be prepared to take the criticism for any actions that they as a company make. It's not like some crazy guy in engineering started printing press releases on the office copier and Sun didn't know about it - the actions that Sun has taken reflect poorly on the entire company.
Oh good, an unfounded opinion with no supporting evidence...
They should have access to your system the way they do now.
...followed by an incomprehensible statement. So either you don't want things to change at all, you're missing some key words in there, or you're using "now" to mean two different timeframes.
As a comment this isn't too far from the average/. comment posted here. But it's definitely not "Insightful". I've read it five times and still have no insight into what the author was getting at.
[even more OT] While I'm ranting, what's up with everybody cutting and pasting their signatures at the bottom of their posts? If you have a/. account, you can put your signature in the space provided on your user page. Then other readers can turn off signature displays in their user profiles, and not have to download and view signatures. If everybody just pastes their signature lines at the bottom of their messages, then the system doesn't work.
For those who mentioned getting bad hardware because they bought the cheapest stuff they could find on Pricewatch, there's another site you should look at before you decide to where to buy. Check out Reseller Ratings to find out how lots of electronic retailers are rated by their customers. When I was shopping for PC parts a couple months ago, I went back and forth between these two sites extensively to find the best place to buy, and I didn't have any problems with my purchases (yet) even though I ended up buying hardware from 7 or 8 different sites. They list an absolute ranking for each site in several categories, and also display any submitted comments in case you're more interested in anecdotal rankings of the sites.
I should point out that I'm not affiliated with either site, I've just been happy with the information found there. Your experiences may vary (and I'm sure I'll hear about it below:).
How would having source to your apps and OS protect you from this sort of email virus? Assuming that there is a Linux email reader which can auto-execute embedded code, you'd still be vulnerable if you had that feature turned on - regardless of any code auditing.
I believe in a previous/. article someone described such a mail reader - I'm thinking emacs but I'm not sure. Anyone know?
I'm curious - I'm getting the Telocity DSL service through them, with Earthcafe as an ISP. How do you know that they are Linux friendly? I don't see that on their site. I didn't know this before signing up with them; this is an unexpected bonus.
But there's a difference between copyright and patent law: a patent is a right to the production of a particular type of mechanism (an implementation of an idea), whereas a copyright is a right to the distribution a particular created work (a presentation of an idea). Neither of those kinds of law restrict the actual idea which is at the heart of the IP. Short of a non-disclosure agreement (contract law) you can't really restrict an idea, only a physical manifestation of it in some form or another.
In your example, you would have copyright on your notes on RSA (assuming the presentation is sufficiently different from your professor's - which is really the question here) and you would have the knowledge of RSA in your mind, but if you build a working implementation of RSA you might be infringing on a patent.
It's true that in terms of their assets and some laws, a corporation is a close approximation of an individual. However, Blitter is correct in that corporations have only the rights which are granted to them by federal, state, and local authorities (and ultimately by the society of individuals, who are responsible for the government in the first place). This is why the CEO of a corporation can avoid personal bankruptcy if their corporation goes under - some government has granted them certain rights (via appropriate legislation) to avoid seizure of personal assets, etc.
Individuals have inalienable rights which cannot be revoked by federal, state, or local governments, because they were not granted by those governments, but are instead the natural rights of any human being.
It's about whether the high-tech industry will be driven by competition on the merits or by lawyers in smoke-filled rooms.
I don't know if that's the right parallel you want to draw. Most of the exclusionary contracts Microsoft signed with OEMs to destroy Netscape were negotiated in secret (possibly in smoke-filled rooms, but that seems a little less likely in the tech industry). In contrast, the government's lawyers have been dragging evidence of Microsoft's actions into the cold, clear light of the courtroom (where there is definitely no smoking allowed) for most of the 90s. Do you really think that any of those dealings would be public knowledge without the government's interference? I don't usually favor the actions of lawyers, but at least their actions (good and bad) are normally a matter of public record. I wish we could say that for businessmen.
One of Microsoft's virtues is that it has been essentially apolitical. Bill Gates has more money than God, yet until this antitrust case he had essentially ignored Washington.
Just last month Microsoft was lobbying to have the budget of the Department of Justice decreased because they were unhappy with being investigated by the government. Not exactly apolitical. Perhaps slightly less political than a tobacco company, if that's your standard.
If this legal looting succeeds, he may decide that government influence is more important than market leadership, and start buying up influence in Washington. If you think Bill Gates is vicious now, wait until he has several dozen legislators eating out of his hand.
Let me get this straight - either Microsoft is allowed to continue leaving a trail of shattered standards and vanished competitors across the tech industry, or else they'll simply buy the government? Frankly, those choices are appalling. Perhaps we should buy a new copy of Win98 and make the check out to "protection"?
If neither Standard Oil nor AT&T (who each had a near-stranglehold on essential national utilities) could buy the government and prevent dissolution, you probably shouldn't hold out much hope for Microsoft on that account.
I don't agree with the "popular names" clause, as I stated before. However, from your description it doesn't sound like the Newton situation would fall under the new law anyway. I'm not familiar with the background on this, but it sounds like newton.com wasn't held by Mr. Newton solely to squeeze a lot of money out of Apple computer. This case sounds like the same old "big corp. unleashes lawyers and dollars to grab by intimidation what they can't take by law" story. See veronica.org, ajax.org, etc. If newton.com wasn't a business with interests in the same arena as the trademark holder, then it should have been safe from Apple's actions.
Of course things didn't work out that way. But the course of events in the newton.com situation would not have been altered by the proposed cyber-squatting bill. The real problems were:
NSI's trademark dispute resolution policy, which assumes that the accuser is correct and puts the burden of proof on the shoulders of the accused
The disparity between the financial and legal resources of your normal big business and the resources of a small domain owner
The legal system, which allows the disparity in resources to play a deciding role in many of these cases
I'll be the first person to agree with you that the current legal situation involving domain name disputes favors big business considerably at the expense of the individual domain owner. I just want to see the real issues are being addressed, rather than the usual/. railing against everything the government does. Removing the popular names clause and adding some protection for the individual domain owner (loser pays legal costs in trademark disputes?) would be a welcome addition to this bill, but I don't see how prohibitions specifically against "cybersquatting with intent to resell to the registered trademark owner" can be used to take away an individual's personal domain, like newton.com, veronica.org, or ajax.org.
On a somewhat similar note, how exactly will this bill facilitate taking away individuals' domain names? As opposed to taking away domain names from businesses which make their money from cyber-squatting, for example. According to the NY Times article, the bill affects only those who buy domain names (which are registered trademarks or "popular names" (meaning what?)) only for the purpose of resale to others who might have an interest in such a domain.
My opinion: I'm not sure I agree with the inclusion of "popular names" - that seems a little arbitrary - but squatting on registered trademarks solely for the purpose of scalping them to the trademark holders is probably a bad thing. Of course, intent is tough to prove as well, not to mention enforcement in foreign countries.
My point is that/. describing this as a "bill to facilitate taking away individuals' domain names" is fairly inflammatory language, and I'd like to hear the basis for this claim.
[ObOnTopic] Unrelated riders do suck - when was the last time an unrelated rider turned out to be a good thing, or even turned out to be a better thing than passing the rider legislation as its own bill?
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Why not? If they're trying to produce a foolproof, easy to use but yet secure OS, shouldn't their testers include some fools? I'm really not being sarcastic here - some of the biggest bugs are found by people who don't know how to use the product and just try what looks like a good approach.
With any product, this can easily blow up in your face. On a *nix box, typing random text into files in /etc isn't a recommended approach to system administration. But MS sells a lot on the basis of ease of use and customer familiarity with Windows. They should be testing their products with users who have no clues and are just depending on ease of use to get them through. We'll see how secure the OS is under those circumstances.
Good point - in thinking back to this morning's drive to work, they usually announce it as "National Public Radio broadcast on Chicago Public Radio WBEZ". So it's a local station which is public (funded some by the government? but mostly by contributions) that buys NPR programming. They also trade local content back and forth like TV networks, though - if news happens in Illinois, NPR usually has a local WBEZ reporter on the scene.
So we should distinguish between any bias which may be present in the national portion of the programming, versus the local portion. In that sense, it may indeed seem in some areas that NPR is leftward-leaning, because a national program will tend towards what is the average sentiment across the entire country, and when you broadcast this in a very conservative section of the country, it will seem out of place. That doesn't necessarily make them leftists, it just makes them more leftist than their audience.
To satisfy my curiosity, could you cite specific examples of left-wing propaganda on NPR? Perhaps this is different between local stations, but I've been impressed by the balance of opposing viewpoints on NPR in my area (WBEZ in Chicago). Off the top of my head, here are some right-wing topics which they've discussed favorably in the past few months:
For all I know, your local NPR station could be very leftist, but I don't think you can categorize them all that way.
Are you kidding? I use the Abstain kernel module every day :)
Are you related to the Rod? I've always wanted to meet it ...
One comment about copyright: it was originally created for authors, not for those who owned printing presses. Read any history of Shakespeare, for example, and you'll hear a lot about unscrupulous printers who print and sell an author's works without due compensation. For the people that already had printing presses (granted, an expensive proposition) life before copyright was 100% profit except for costs of materials and distribution, because you didn't have to pay the content creator (if you could get away without doing so). Copyright protected content creators by providing them with a legal tool to protect their creations. This wasn't as good financially for the printers, but on the other hand it encouraged content creation because authors knew they were less likely to be ripped off. Over time this made publishing a much bigger industry than it otherwise might have been.
I agree with most of the points that you made - we have arrived in an era where everyone has an electronic printing press, but yet we still need to preserve the legal balance between content producers and content distributors that encourages content creation. This is going to be new and interesting because now everyone can be a content distributor.
I'll echo that non-trouble report: K6-2/350, 2.2.14, Mandrake 6.1 ==> no problems. I did get kernel oopses at the end of the init 0 sequence with the 2.2.13ish kernel that came with the 6.1 release, but after moving to 2.2.14 even that works fine. My only complaint is that Linux+X+KDE w/o any extra themage+Netscape and no servers running still uses about 56M of my 64M of memory, so it swaps a little too much. But another 64 or 128 that I've been planning on should fix that.
I don't see how you can use this news item to infer that Mandrake continues to become less stable. The post to which you're replying describes this as alpha software; there's no reason to think that the released Mandrake 7 will be as bad.
Your other arguments are well-reasoned, but if you think kids can't find eye-opening stuff at a public library, you haven't looked very far.
Actually, the encryption was a trade secret, and thus it is fair game for anyone who figures it out to distribute it. If they had patented the DVD encryption process, then it wouldn't have taken nearly as long to get a decoder written! It does sound like the reverse-engineering wasn't completely "clean-room", but on the other hand apparently that isn't an issue in the country where DeCSS was written. Can a case be made against those who live in a country with restrictions on reverse engineering, but distribute code RE'd by someone in an unrestricted country? That seems to be the plaintiff's strongest legal leg.
I wonder if they might also make the argument that they have the copyright to the encryption keys themselves, and thus the redistribution of the keys would be illegal in most countries. That would force DVD viewers to crack the keys for themselves, rather than getting a key list distributed with DeCSS. In a way, this would be security through legal obscurity - it wouldn't stop the spread of unauthorized DVD viewers, but it might slow it a bit.
Contents of this post are subject to my uncertain recollection of all the facts of this case - flame away!
Woops - you're right, I should read more closely before replying. Of course the X Consortium deserves the domain - they're the first thing that I think of. It's surprising that the domain didn't get grabbed for a porn site first, though!
I don't know about 2600.com or hp.com, but I've heard that one-letter domains were only allowed for a short time before they were disallowed. The x.com folks probably registered it during that short window.
The Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched from ships off the shore of Iraq. An ICBM could be launched from the U.S. and hit Iraq, but I don't think it would have quite that level of accuracy (as with hand grenades, close is good enough). No ICBMs were fired at Iraq to my knowledge, though.
I like the idea of a "smart probe". I'm not sure whether the Mars Global Surveyor photos (currently the best we have, I think) are of high enough quality for that sort of positioning - you really want very accurate terrain measurements down to the level of the smallest object that you can't land a probe on. And you can still be wrecked by dust storms during your landing sequence, which happened to some Soviet mars probes.
Of course a cruise missile doesn't hvae
But that's exactly it - when you distribute a press release with "Sun Microsystems, Inc" on the letterhead, it is a representation of the entire company. Postings on /. or elsewhere don't represent the entire Linux community, because there is no legal association which defines the entire Linux community. But Sun is a legal entity and they should be prepared to take the criticism for any actions that they as a company make. It's not like some crazy guy in engineering started printing press releases on the office copier and Sun didn't know about it - the actions that Sun has taken reflect poorly on the entire company.
According to Steve Forbes on the debate last night, it's "Lunix". A Unix for Lunatics, perhaps?
And this was "Insightful" how?
Oh good, an unfounded opinion with no supporting evidence...
...followed by an incomprehensible statement. So either you don't want things to change at all, you're missing some key words in there, or you're using "now" to mean two different timeframes.
As a comment this isn't too far from the average /. comment posted here. But it's definitely not "Insightful". I've read it five times and still have no insight into what the author was getting at.
[even more OT] While I'm ranting, what's up with everybody cutting and pasting their signatures at the bottom of their posts? If you have a /. account, you can put your signature in the space provided on your user page. Then other readers can turn off signature displays in their user profiles, and not have to download and view signatures. If everybody just pastes their signature lines at the bottom of their messages, then the system doesn't work.
OK, I think I'm done now.
For those who mentioned getting bad hardware because they bought the cheapest stuff they could find on Pricewatch, there's another site you should look at before you decide to where to buy. Check out Reseller Ratings to find out how lots of electronic retailers are rated by their customers. When I was shopping for PC parts a couple months ago, I went back and forth between these two sites extensively to find the best place to buy, and I didn't have any problems with my purchases (yet) even though I ended up buying hardware from 7 or 8 different sites. They list an absolute ranking for each site in several categories, and also display any submitted comments in case you're more interested in anecdotal rankings of the sites.
I should point out that I'm not affiliated with either site, I've just been happy with the information found there. Your experiences may vary (and I'm sure I'll hear about it below :).
How would having source to your apps and OS protect you from this sort of email virus? Assuming that there is a Linux email reader which can auto-execute embedded code, you'd still be vulnerable if you had that feature turned on - regardless of any code auditing.
I believe in a previous /. article someone described such a mail reader - I'm thinking emacs but I'm not sure. Anyone know?
Funny, my instant reaction was "This is going into a Dreamcast?". Too many spiral logos.
I'm curious - I'm getting the Telocity DSL service through them, with Earthcafe as an ISP. How do you know that they are Linux friendly? I don't see that on their site. I didn't know this before signing up with them; this is an unexpected bonus.
But there's a difference between copyright and patent law: a patent is a right to the production of a particular type of mechanism (an implementation of an idea), whereas a copyright is a right to the distribution a particular created work (a presentation of an idea). Neither of those kinds of law restrict the actual idea which is at the heart of the IP. Short of a non-disclosure agreement (contract law) you can't really restrict an idea, only a physical manifestation of it in some form or another.
In your example, you would have copyright on your notes on RSA (assuming the presentation is sufficiently different from your professor's - which is really the question here) and you would have the knowledge of RSA in your mind, but if you build a working implementation of RSA you might be infringing on a patent.
It's true that in terms of their assets and some laws, a corporation is a close approximation of an individual. However, Blitter is correct in that corporations have only the rights which are granted to them by federal, state, and local authorities (and ultimately by the society of individuals, who are responsible for the government in the first place). This is why the CEO of a corporation can avoid personal bankruptcy if their corporation goes under - some government has granted them certain rights (via appropriate legislation) to avoid seizure of personal assets, etc.
Individuals have inalienable rights which cannot be revoked by federal, state, or local governments, because they were not granted by those governments, but are instead the natural rights of any human being.
I don't know if that's the right parallel you want to draw. Most of the exclusionary contracts Microsoft signed with OEMs to destroy Netscape were negotiated in secret (possibly in smoke-filled rooms, but that seems a little less likely in the tech industry). In contrast, the government's lawyers have been dragging evidence of Microsoft's actions into the cold, clear light of the courtroom (where there is definitely no smoking allowed) for most of the 90s. Do you really think that any of those dealings would be public knowledge without the government's interference? I don't usually favor the actions of lawyers, but at least their actions (good and bad) are normally a matter of public record. I wish we could say that for businessmen.
Just last month Microsoft was lobbying to have the budget of the Department of Justice decreased because they were unhappy with being investigated by the government. Not exactly apolitical. Perhaps slightly less political than a tobacco company, if that's your standard.
Let me get this straight - either Microsoft is allowed to continue leaving a trail of shattered standards and vanished competitors across the tech industry, or else they'll simply buy the government? Frankly, those choices are appalling. Perhaps we should buy a new copy of Win98 and make the check out to "protection"?
If neither Standard Oil nor AT&T (who each had a near-stranglehold on essential national utilities) could buy the government and prevent dissolution, you probably shouldn't hold out much hope for Microsoft on that account.
I don't agree with the "popular names" clause, as I stated before. However, from your description it doesn't sound like the Newton situation would fall under the new law anyway. I'm not familiar with the background on this, but it sounds like newton.com wasn't held by Mr. Newton solely to squeeze a lot of money out of Apple computer. This case sounds like the same old "big corp. unleashes lawyers and dollars to grab by intimidation what they can't take by law" story. See veronica.org, ajax.org, etc. If newton.com wasn't a business with interests in the same arena as the trademark holder, then it should have been safe from Apple's actions.
Of course things didn't work out that way. But the course of events in the newton.com situation would not have been altered by the proposed cyber-squatting bill. The real problems were:
I'll be the first person to agree with you that the current legal situation involving domain name disputes favors big business considerably at the expense of the individual domain owner. I just want to see the real issues are being addressed, rather than the usual /. railing against everything the government does. Removing the popular names clause and adding some protection for the individual domain owner (loser pays legal costs in trademark disputes?) would be a welcome addition to this bill, but I don't see how prohibitions specifically against "cybersquatting with intent to resell to the registered trademark owner" can be used to take away an individual's personal domain, like newton.com, veronica.org, or ajax.org.
On a somewhat similar note, how exactly will this bill facilitate taking away individuals' domain names? As opposed to taking away domain names from businesses which make their money from cyber-squatting, for example. According to the NY Times article, the bill affects only those who buy domain names (which are registered trademarks or "popular names" (meaning what?)) only for the purpose of resale to others who might have an interest in such a domain.
My opinion: I'm not sure I agree with the inclusion of "popular names" - that seems a little arbitrary - but squatting on registered trademarks solely for the purpose of scalping them to the trademark holders is probably a bad thing. Of course, intent is tough to prove as well, not to mention enforcement in foreign countries.
My point is that /. describing this as a "bill to facilitate taking away individuals' domain names" is fairly inflammatory language, and I'd like to hear the basis for this claim.
[ObOnTopic] Unrelated riders do suck - when was the last time an unrelated rider turned out to be a good thing, or even turned out to be a better thing than passing the rider legislation as its own bill?