Unfortunately, when you have shareholders you can no longer afford to act on the basis of your ethics. Money is the only real measure of your existence. Sure, in some cases presenting an ethical appearance may help bring in the money, but never mistake that for the real motivation.
Sadly, it doesn't surprise me what any publicly-traded corporation does anymore.
So, exactly which of these comments was undeserved Microsoft bashing?
Never mind that the majority of business-type servers run other companies' software, and
were therefore never affected in the first place. Never mind that it was a sadly untypical
security flaw in Microsoft's server software that allowed Code Red to flourish. Note also that
the million-plus people drawn to Microsoft's website by that patch included many thousands
who didn't need it (the worm only hits Windows NT or 2000. Windows 95, 98 and ME are
unaffected).
Those all seem to be right on target to me. Or was it the comparison to Stalin? Give the guy room for a little journalistic allusion:)
Furthermore, how is it exactly that TCP/MS would prevent things like Code Red from happening?
That's the real point that Cringely comes to - it won't really make a difference. If the whole thing is just a setup to force a shift to MS/TCP, then actually stopping Code Red isn't really Microsoft's game.
A lot of the posts here are pointing out the technical fixes that already exist for these problems. But if Cringely is right and this is a "hearts and minds" gambit, it won't matter that there are other ways to do it right; the public and the government will clamor for MS/TCP and they'll get it. The public doesn't care that IPV6 or better email clients or PKI will solve their problems when Microsoft is willing to do it and it's "free" on your new computer.
I think Cringely has a pretty good point, especially with the "Microsoft virus" versus "email virus" thing. From now on, I resolve to call it a "Microsoft virus" and see who gives me a double take:)
That makes sense, but it seems like admins always have three or four other high-priority projects that they could be working on when they're dealing with viruses instead. Things like getting ahead on their patching for the new security holes, setting up network security scanners, planning new software rollouts, etc. There is a real cost to the whole business when you take admins off of their planned support duties and throw them into minute-to-minute emergency virus defense.
You're right - I over-generalized there. I meant "it's good that the program is GPL versus closed-source", rather than "it's good that the program is GPL rather than BSD or whatnot". Thanks for the clarification, MS Bob - I knew you'd actually be helpful someday;)
If it's GPL'd, you can do what you want whether or not the original author approves. You may not be able to use the name "Tux Racer" if it's trademarked, but the whole point of the GPL is that you can fork the code in situations like this without giving a care what the original author wants. People complain about the forking when it's just a result of an easily-bruised ego, but in this case I think the GPL has allowed things to work out just as they should.
On another note, why does tuxracer.com still say that it's hosted at SourceForge? Shouldn't a commercial game company pay for their own hosting, and leave the free hosting for people who are cranking out free software without expectation of reimbursement?
If my foot were in such a situation, it should be up to me what happens to it. Remember, her cells aren't magically immortal; researchers have to nourish them to keep them alive. If they were still in her body or were left in the operating room, they would have long been dead by now. It's more like a person in a persistent vegetative state who needs a heart and lung machine - the body may live indefinitely, but there's no person involved anymore. In that case the person's family gets to decide when to pull the plug. In Mrs. Lack's case her body has been essentially kept on life support for fifty years, which is almost assuredly not what she or her family would have wanted. How would you like to find out that your grandmother wasn't really buried even though you thought that you had?
It's great that her cells are special and have helped cure diseases. I'm glad that such cells can do some good in the world. But it should be up to her and her family to decide what uses those cells can be put. And if they don't want to contribute to the progress of science, that should be their choice.
Very interesting - I remember reading a book called "The Duplicated Man" by James Blish, about a colony on Venus that declared their independence from Earth. They were ruled by a huge man who was effectively immortal but slowly losing his humanity, because the secret to immortality was to effectively give all of your cells cancer and make them immortal. So his body would never die (and in fact was always growing), but his mind was another story...
The actual story was mostly about a machine that could duplicate people (sorta), if you're wondering about the title.
It's sad. Henrietta Lacks is a living legend who continues to live and help people even after death. I'm sure
anyone would want to have the cure for polio and other diseases attributed to their name.
Maybe you'd be willing to volunteer for immortality in a petri dish in her place, since you can make the decision and she never was given the opportunity. No matter how great the cause, you can't ethically subject a person's body to experimentation after their death without their consent. Would you mind being dug up by medical students after your death and used for studies that advanced human medicine, while you were expecting to just lie and rot in peace instead? The ends do not justify the means.
I personally think it's
disgusting to put money into this as this film-maker woman seems to want to do. We're talking about the human
species here, not money or questions of racial black-white. This is much larger than trivial issues of that nature.
I can kind of see her point - if this happened to a white woman in the 1950s, do you think the medical community would have been quite so cavalier with her cells, including keeping the information from her family for so long? Let's face it - one of the reasons that Mrs. Lack was an ideal subject was because her family was poor, black, and wouldn't kick up a fuss about any postmortem exploitation of her body.
Hmmm, with NS 4.75 on Solaris it's still broken. Even "view source" shows '?' rather than any kind of quote.
If Mozilla includes a built-in demoroniser, then I'll be upgrading right away. I'd prefer to rain fiery death on Redmond in thanks for smart quotes, but just being able to ignore them would be nice.
Somebody involved in this story is not a Linux company - either MySQL, NuSphere, or maybe LinuxGram. Why do I say this? The article is full of those ?smart quotes? that need to be demoronised. Since the dumb quotes are throughout the article, I'm thinking that LinuxGram is running things on Windows somewhere. That's pretty sad, really.
Wouldn't it bother you if someone made an exact clone of you, and then put that clone to work in the salt mines or picking cotton until he or she (because clones aren't 'it') died? How is it any different for someone to harvest cells from you and put them to work for profit well beyond their (your) natural life span? It may not be slavery of a whole person, but it's definitely slavery of parts of your body. Would it be OK with you if after you suffered brain death due to a disease, doctors re-animated your corpse with a simple microcontroller (a few years from now it could happen) and put you to work cleaning the halls at the hospital? I can't believe that more people don't see the ethical problems involved in enslaving someone's flesh like this.
It's great that medical science can cure this woman's cancer, but it's exceedingly unethical to continue to use these cells without her permission or at least the permission of her family. It's true that they could get cells from anybody to use, and if they don't have permission from her then they should do that instead. Maybe some doctor who's a great philanthropist could donate his cells and ensure that his name is remembered forever. But Mrs. Lacks didn't ask for immortality and it's unethical to force it upon her.
Any person in America who knowingly believes in jeopardizing the safety of the United States is not an American.
In my opinion, their actions are philisophical treason. They may be, technically, "American," but they are far from
truely being an American, as would be judged by the Founding Fathers.
You can't just tar someone as unamerican because they disagree with you, Mr. McCarthy. In my opinion, star wars jeopardizes the safety of the U.S. more than MAD does, because the money spent on star wars won't prevent any real attacks on the U.S., but similar funds spent on nuclear nonproliferation would prevent attacks.
MAD has kept the peace against Russia for half of a century, and I don't see that it will stop working any time soon unless the U.S. does something to destabilize the balance of power. Star wars will be ineffective against large nuclear powers since it isn't a 100% kill guarantee, and ineffective against "rogue states" and terrorists because they'll use suitcase bombs, biological weapons, or other more intimate means of destruction.
Therefore I respectfully submit that your support of star wars is in fact unamerican, and that you are a traitor, because you support actions which would harm the safety of the U.S. See how easy it is to label someone as unamerican because they disagree with you? Doesn't feel so good now, does it?
But looking at it the other way, if they can force a dinky third world country to have to launch extra missiles that
they don't have in order to carry all that countermeasure crap, it's a win for our side.
Dinky third-world countries use suitcase nukes delivered by suicide bombers. They're already not planning to spend any money on ballistic missiles; star wars isn't going to dissuade them any further.
You're looking at it from the wrong direction. Suppose nobody payed for DirectTV?
Well, their costs are still the same, except they don't have to pay for programming now:) Their problem is being in a business where the costs of the business aren't proportional to the sales of the business. This is good if your sales happen to be really high, bad if your sales are really low. In DirecTV's case they can't build up capacity as their paid subscriber base increases, they had to put up the money up front and then hope that they could keep enough paying viewers. But this means that just as adding another paying customer brings in more revenue at zero additional cost, adding another non-paying "pirate" brings in no revenue at zero additional cost. It's not a win, but it's not costing DirecTV anything more.
I bet you could remotely read the
electromagnetic fields of coaxial cable with the right equipment, does that make stealing cable OK? What about
looking at someone's magazine with a telescope?
Would you object to my use of a laser to eavesdrop on your house? Your vibrating windows are visible from my
property.
I think that is more of a privacy issue; in this sense I'm not peering into DirecTV's plant somehow, they're sending me the signal of their own free will. I'm not sure where I draw the line on privacy in the law, but I do know that if I really cared about the security of what I had to say, I'd protect it with appropriate technological measures (shielding from Van Eck interception, vibration-proofed windows, etc.) even if if was against the law to snoop on me anyway. Laws that deal with information interception like DirecTV's broadcasts or cell phone scanning are pretty hard to enforce since there's no direct way to tell that someone's doing it. The reasonable person would use sufficient technology to protect their communications, or expect that they will be compromised.
At some point there is a line where "it is freely available" can no
longer be reasonably believed, and I think that by altering the hardware which you purchased and signed a contract
governing the use of you have crossed pretty far into the unreasonable side (not to mention tht said equipment
was illegal resold, which is what the major pirates were arrested for in the first place- RTFA).
And that's the crux of the matter. I agree with you that if you signed a contract not to alter or resell your DTV receiver, then you're SOL (in fact, I think I mentioned that in the parent post or somewhere else in this article). Although I don't think DirecTV/Hughes was wise to just rely on this contractual provision, since as they're finding out it's pretty tough to track down the folks that are breaking the contract. Like I said, if they really wanted to keep it a secret from the whole world, they probably should have protected their hardware better.
If you built a
DirecTV receiver from scratch, more power to you.
Yes, I really should put my money where my mouth is, I suppose:) Considering that I'm backed up about a year on the projects-to-tackle stack, maybe I'll do that someday, but probably not.
And, before anyone posts the 'well they broadcast their signal onto my property' defense, I don't buy into that and
never will. The fact that these same people would be outraged if they were videotaped and/or voice recorded if they
walked by my property (despite the fact that they are reflecting light and broadcasting sound waves onto my
property) just makes it more ridiculous.
I don't think those would be the same people - as far as I'm concerned, if I send any signals onto your property you can do whatever the hell you want with them. I just expect the same courtesy from DirecTV:)
This should be in an FAQ somewhere - you can't OR together the beliefs of two or more random slashdotters and bemoan the logical inconsistencies that arise. You don't think that the rabid Linux zealots in this forum are the same ones who are always defending Microsoft's software, do you?
P.S. Does anyone else see this "Invalid Form Key" error on their posts sometimes? Hopefully it's not just me...
Ah yes, the good old "if it's in plain sight you should expect it to be stolen" defense. I guess I'll just help myself to
your car (parked on a public street no less!) and the contents of your mailbox. And it was your fault for not keeping
these items inside your house.
The point is not so much that if it's in plain sight it's fair game, even though it is the case that DirecTV is sending their signals onto my private property without my permission and shouldn't have any say in what I do with those signals after that. The point is that there is no marginal increase in the production cost of the system for the system operators due to one more person decoding the signal correctly, rather than just letting the signal pass directly through their body. Therefore, I don't agree with the argument that "piracy" costs them anything at all, since the major costs of the system (the satellite constellation) were incurred before any legitimate or illegitimate signal reception even occurred.
There's a difference between stealing my mail, which would deprive me of it, and decoding this particular radio signal, which doesn't deprive anyone of anything. If I had a conversation with my wife on the front steps and didn't sufficiently obfuscate the language I was using, could I really complain that you heard what I was saying from the street? Even if it somehow cost me money to say it?
I assume the "lousy" part of their business model is that they have something you want and you aren't allowed to
get it for free. Tough shit. They have to pay for the satellite, so they charge the people who use it. You want to
watch their content, so you pay them for its percieved value. What's wrong with that?
I don't have a DirecTV, hacked or not, so the question is really more academic for me. I just don't like to see "pirates" blamed for DirecTV's security failings. You can make the argument that it would be morally and ethically correct to help pay for the satellites that send you the signal, and I would probably agree with that. I just don't think that I have a requirement to not decode this freely-published transmission just because DirecTV said so.
You could make the argument that it will be harder for DirecTV to pay for content for their network if they've made some sort of deals that mention specific numbers of subscribers or something like that. But that is a failure of their business plan and their lawyers rather than an effect of extra people decoding the signal. A business plan built upon the assumption that you could literally throw content to the winds and somehow prohibit unauthorized users from understanding it had better be backed up by some pretty invulnerable hardware, software, and signals security. If it gets hacked, DirecTV only has themselves to blame (well, and Hughes:).
Also "they are getting crazy with the protective measures". What would you expect them to do? They are losing
revenue to people pirating the signal.
Actually, I would disagree with that. They already have to blanket the country with their radio signals. The cost is the same for them whether those signals go through my head, a large rock, or a legal DirecTV receiver.
It may be against the terms of your contract to hack your decoder, or to sell it to someone else with the understanding that they would hack it. I don't defend those who have broken such an agreement with DirecTV. But it's not my problem that DirecTV picked the lousy business model of "let's send our signal everywhere, and just sell secret decoder rings". If they weren't going to be able to develop unhackable decoders, maybe they should have picked a different business.
Sigh... The Canadians are the only real heroes in this story:)
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, when you have shareholders you can no longer afford to act on the basis of your ethics. Money is the only real measure of your existence. Sure, in some cases presenting an ethical appearance may help bring in the money, but never mistake that for the real motivation.
Sadly, it doesn't surprise me what any publicly-traded corporation does anymore.
Wow, dejà vu all over again :)
One sentence explanation for ignorant management: "We shouldn't have used IIS on Windows".
New killer app: Microsoft Visual Worm.NET
Marketing.
Oh, wait - they're trying to sell the phones, not buy them. My mistake :)
So, exactly which of these comments was undeserved Microsoft bashing?
Those all seem to be right on target to me. Or was it the comparison to Stalin? Give the guy room for a little journalistic allusion :)
That's the real point that Cringely comes to - it won't really make a difference. If the whole thing is just a setup to force a shift to MS/TCP, then actually stopping Code Red isn't really Microsoft's game.
A lot of the posts here are pointing out the technical fixes that already exist for these problems. But if Cringely is right and this is a "hearts and minds" gambit, it won't matter that there are other ways to do it right; the public and the government will clamor for MS/TCP and they'll get it. The public doesn't care that IPV6 or better email clients or PKI will solve their problems when Microsoft is willing to do it and it's "free" on your new computer.
I think Cringely has a pretty good point, especially with the "Microsoft virus" versus "email virus" thing. From now on, I resolve to call it a "Microsoft virus" and see who gives me a double take :)
That makes sense, but it seems like admins always have three or four other high-priority projects that they could be working on when they're dealing with viruses instead. Things like getting ahead on their patching for the new security holes, setting up network security scanners, planning new software rollouts, etc. There is a real cost to the whole business when you take admins off of their planned support duties and throw them into minute-to-minute emergency virus defense.
You're right - I over-generalized there. I meant "it's good that the program is GPL versus closed-source", rather than "it's good that the program is GPL rather than BSD or whatnot". Thanks for the clarification, MS Bob - I knew you'd actually be helpful someday ;)
If it's GPL'd, you can do what you want whether or not the original author approves. You may not be able to use the name "Tux Racer" if it's trademarked, but the whole point of the GPL is that you can fork the code in situations like this without giving a care what the original author wants. People complain about the forking when it's just a result of an easily-bruised ego, but in this case I think the GPL has allowed things to work out just as they should.
On another note, why does tuxracer.com still say that it's hosted at SourceForge? Shouldn't a commercial game company pay for their own hosting, and leave the free hosting for people who are cranking out free software without expectation of reimbursement?
This is like that guy in debate club who always wanted to define "and" and "is". Wait, those were the Prez. and Mr. Gates. Never mind :)
If my foot were in such a situation, it should be up to me what happens to it. Remember, her cells aren't magically immortal; researchers have to nourish them to keep them alive. If they were still in her body or were left in the operating room, they would have long been dead by now. It's more like a person in a persistent vegetative state who needs a heart and lung machine - the body may live indefinitely, but there's no person involved anymore. In that case the person's family gets to decide when to pull the plug. In Mrs. Lack's case her body has been essentially kept on life support for fifty years, which is almost assuredly not what she or her family would have wanted. How would you like to find out that your grandmother wasn't really buried even though you thought that you had?
It's great that her cells are special and have helped cure diseases. I'm glad that such cells can do some good in the world. But it should be up to her and her family to decide what uses those cells can be put. And if they don't want to contribute to the progress of science, that should be their choice.
Very interesting - I remember reading a book called "The Duplicated Man" by James Blish, about a colony on Venus that declared their independence from Earth. They were ruled by a huge man who was effectively immortal but slowly losing his humanity, because the secret to immortality was to effectively give all of your cells cancer and make them immortal. So his body would never die (and in fact was always growing), but his mind was another story...
The actual story was mostly about a machine that could duplicate people (sorta), if you're wondering about the title.
Maybe you'd be willing to volunteer for immortality in a petri dish in her place, since you can make the decision and she never was given the opportunity. No matter how great the cause, you can't ethically subject a person's body to experimentation after their death without their consent. Would you mind being dug up by medical students after your death and used for studies that advanced human medicine, while you were expecting to just lie and rot in peace instead? The ends do not justify the means.
I can kind of see her point - if this happened to a white woman in the 1950s, do you think the medical community would have been quite so cavalier with her cells, including keeping the information from her family for so long? Let's face it - one of the reasons that Mrs. Lack was an ideal subject was because her family was poor, black, and wouldn't kick up a fuss about any postmortem exploitation of her body.
But when you drive your Ford SUV like a sports car and it rolls over and maims your stupid ass, do you sue Ford?
You bet :)
Hmmm, with NS 4.75 on Solaris it's still broken. Even "view source" shows '?' rather than any kind of quote.
If Mozilla includes a built-in demoroniser, then I'll be upgrading right away. I'd prefer to rain fiery death on Redmond in thanks for smart quotes, but just being able to ignore them would be nice.
Somebody involved in this story is not a Linux company - either MySQL, NuSphere, or maybe LinuxGram. Why do I say this? The article is full of those ?smart quotes? that need to be demoronised. Since the dumb quotes are throughout the article, I'm thinking that LinuxGram is running things on Windows somewhere. That's pretty sad, really.
Wouldn't it bother you if someone made an exact clone of you, and then put that clone to work in the salt mines or picking cotton until he or she (because clones aren't 'it') died? How is it any different for someone to harvest cells from you and put them to work for profit well beyond their (your) natural life span? It may not be slavery of a whole person, but it's definitely slavery of parts of your body. Would it be OK with you if after you suffered brain death due to a disease, doctors re-animated your corpse with a simple microcontroller (a few years from now it could happen) and put you to work cleaning the halls at the hospital? I can't believe that more people don't see the ethical problems involved in enslaving someone's flesh like this.
It's great that medical science can cure this woman's cancer, but it's exceedingly unethical to continue to use these cells without her permission or at least the permission of her family. It's true that they could get cells from anybody to use, and if they don't have permission from her then they should do that instead. Maybe some doctor who's a great philanthropist could donate his cells and ensure that his name is remembered forever. But Mrs. Lacks didn't ask for immortality and it's unethical to force it upon her.
Maybe they just want us to spend a lot of money on a missile defense, so that it's easier for them to develop and deploy a suitcase nuke :)
You can't just tar someone as unamerican because they disagree with you, Mr. McCarthy. In my opinion, star wars jeopardizes the safety of the U.S. more than MAD does, because the money spent on star wars won't prevent any real attacks on the U.S., but similar funds spent on nuclear nonproliferation would prevent attacks.
MAD has kept the peace against Russia for half of a century, and I don't see that it will stop working any time soon unless the U.S. does something to destabilize the balance of power. Star wars will be ineffective against large nuclear powers since it isn't a 100% kill guarantee, and ineffective against "rogue states" and terrorists because they'll use suitcase bombs, biological weapons, or other more intimate means of destruction.
Therefore I respectfully submit that your support of star wars is in fact unamerican, and that you are a traitor, because you support actions which would harm the safety of the U.S. See how easy it is to label someone as unamerican because they disagree with you? Doesn't feel so good now, does it?
Dinky third-world countries use suitcase nukes delivered by suicide bombers. They're already not planning to spend any money on ballistic missiles; star wars isn't going to dissuade them any further.
Well, their costs are still the same, except they don't have to pay for programming now :) Their problem is being in a business where the costs of the business aren't proportional to the sales of the business. This is good if your sales happen to be really high, bad if your sales are really low. In DirecTV's case they can't build up capacity as their paid subscriber base increases, they had to put up the money up front and then hope that they could keep enough paying viewers. But this means that just as adding another paying customer brings in more revenue at zero additional cost, adding another non-paying "pirate" brings in no revenue at zero additional cost. It's not a win, but it's not costing DirecTV anything more.
I think that is more of a privacy issue; in this sense I'm not peering into DirecTV's plant somehow, they're sending me the signal of their own free will. I'm not sure where I draw the line on privacy in the law, but I do know that if I really cared about the security of what I had to say, I'd protect it with appropriate technological measures (shielding from Van Eck interception, vibration-proofed windows, etc.) even if if was against the law to snoop on me anyway. Laws that deal with information interception like DirecTV's broadcasts or cell phone scanning are pretty hard to enforce since there's no direct way to tell that someone's doing it. The reasonable person would use sufficient technology to protect their communications, or expect that they will be compromised.
And that's the crux of the matter. I agree with you that if you signed a contract not to alter or resell your DTV receiver, then you're SOL (in fact, I think I mentioned that in the parent post or somewhere else in this article). Although I don't think DirecTV/Hughes was wise to just rely on this contractual provision, since as they're finding out it's pretty tough to track down the folks that are breaking the contract. Like I said, if they really wanted to keep it a secret from the whole world, they probably should have protected their hardware better.
Yes, I really should put my money where my mouth is, I suppose :) Considering that I'm backed up about a year on the projects-to-tackle stack, maybe I'll do that someday, but probably not.
I don't think those would be the same people - as far as I'm concerned, if I send any signals onto your property you can do whatever the hell you want with them. I just expect the same courtesy from DirecTV :)
This should be in an FAQ somewhere - you can't OR together the beliefs of two or more random slashdotters and bemoan the logical inconsistencies that arise. You don't think that the rabid Linux zealots in this forum are the same ones who are always defending Microsoft's software, do you?
P.S. Does anyone else see this "Invalid Form Key" error on their posts sometimes? Hopefully it's not just me...
The point is not so much that if it's in plain sight it's fair game, even though it is the case that DirecTV is sending their signals onto my private property without my permission and shouldn't have any say in what I do with those signals after that. The point is that there is no marginal increase in the production cost of the system for the system operators due to one more person decoding the signal correctly, rather than just letting the signal pass directly through their body. Therefore, I don't agree with the argument that "piracy" costs them anything at all, since the major costs of the system (the satellite constellation) were incurred before any legitimate or illegitimate signal reception even occurred.
There's a difference between stealing my mail, which would deprive me of it, and decoding this particular radio signal, which doesn't deprive anyone of anything. If I had a conversation with my wife on the front steps and didn't sufficiently obfuscate the language I was using, could I really complain that you heard what I was saying from the street? Even if it somehow cost me money to say it?
I don't have a DirecTV, hacked or not, so the question is really more academic for me. I just don't like to see "pirates" blamed for DirecTV's security failings. You can make the argument that it would be morally and ethically correct to help pay for the satellites that send you the signal, and I would probably agree with that. I just don't think that I have a requirement to not decode this freely-published transmission just because DirecTV said so.
You could make the argument that it will be harder for DirecTV to pay for content for their network if they've made some sort of deals that mention specific numbers of subscribers or something like that. But that is a failure of their business plan and their lawyers rather than an effect of extra people decoding the signal. A business plan built upon the assumption that you could literally throw content to the winds and somehow prohibit unauthorized users from understanding it had better be backed up by some pretty invulnerable hardware, software, and signals security. If it gets hacked, DirecTV only has themselves to blame (well, and Hughes :).
Actually, I would disagree with that. They already have to blanket the country with their radio signals. The cost is the same for them whether those signals go through my head, a large rock, or a legal DirecTV receiver.
It may be against the terms of your contract to hack your decoder, or to sell it to someone else with the understanding that they would hack it. I don't defend those who have broken such an agreement with DirecTV. But it's not my problem that DirecTV picked the lousy business model of "let's send our signal everywhere, and just sell secret decoder rings". If they weren't going to be able to develop unhackable decoders, maybe they should have picked a different business.
Sigh... The Canadians are the only real heroes in this story :)