Speaking of shortsighted.... I'm betting right now microsoft is in the middle of damage control and PR spin telling people how little this exploit means and how much the care about security... meanwhile a bunch of blackhats are busy (with a renewed zeal) regression testing for all the old vulnerabilities on microsoft's newer versions of their os and tools.
I will believe microsoft is concerned about security when they expose their own OS and software for public services like web, ftp, and smtp. I will even give them credit for honestly trying when they only hide these services behind firewalls running their own OS.
microsoft exploited Kerberos as well, and it's my understanding that if Ted T'so and the other developers had it to do over again, they would have licensed it under the GPL rather than trusting microsoft to play nice (which they still have not.)
I think what will be funny will be the future "Good Thing", when Microsoft stops allowing activation of XP so that customers are forced to upgrade to the newest, more secure version of their software rather than reinstall their old version of XP. I wonder how many companies that are enjoying the ability to run old apps on DOS/Win95/Win98 are thinking of that implication before upgrading?
What we need is for one of the guys (Michael Robertson?) who got so wealthy off the dot com bubble to set up legitimate content for the AARP crowd. This could be easily done by setting up a large trust for a major university's symphony program. In exchange, all performances would be recorded, ripped to mp3, licensed under the creative commons, and made available on p2p networks. If they could then get the 65+ crowd used to the idea of sharing, all of this other nonsense would go away quickly.
[quote]The point I was making is that Bill Gates, who wasn't particularly wealthy, was able to succeed in software because of its low barriers to entry. I wasn't endorsing everything he has ever done.[/quote]
The only problem with this statement is that is actuality, Bill Gates was born extremely wealthy. At least that is what I would call anyone who receives million dollar gifts in college to start a company. I'm not saying that Bill was not smart, or frugal, he was both of those, but the reason Microsoft is owned by Bill Gates, and not some venture capitol firm like Cisco is because of the millions he got from daddy.
Mr. Gates first sales were of a compiler and operating system to IBM. The OS he purchased from another programmer, and the compiler followed many of the same ideas and designs of DEC Basic (I've heard unsubstantiated rumors that he had looked at the source from the DEC Basic compiler), also he apparently used bios code that he did not have copyright to.
[/quote]
"...the best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system."
-- Bill Gates.
Bricklin sent waves of laughter through the auditorium by reading a passage from Lammers' interview with Bill Gates in which the young Microsoft founder explained that his work on different versions of Microsoft's BASIC compiler was shaped by looking at how other programmers had gone about the same task. Gates went on to say that young programmers don't need computer science degrees: "The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems."
Bricklin finished reading Gates' words and announced, with an impish smile, "This is where Gates and [Richard] Stallman agree!" Source: Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers (1986), ISBN 0914845713
"...the best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system." -- Bill Gates.
Bricklin sent waves of laughter through the auditorium by reading a
passage from Lammers' interview with Bill Gates in which the young Microsoft
founder explained that his work on different versions of Microsoft's BASIC
compiler was shaped by looking at how other programmers had gone about the
same task. Gates went on to say that young programmers don't need computer
science degrees: "The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study
great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the
garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their
operating systems."
Bricklin finished reading Gates' words and announced, with an impish
smile, "This is where Gates and [Richard] Stallman agree!"
Source: Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers
(1986), ISBN 0914845713
I think you may have misunderstood my statement. What I had said was that forcing a cash outlay in order to obtain copyright means that open source projects lose the benefit of copyright. This means that, for example, the GPL becomes unenforcable without spending money to host the materials (which, I presume would mean a renewal fee every time you produced a new version, which would have to be hosted... I have no idea how anonymous CVS would work).
I will try to make this more clear. Product A is released under the GPL. The source code for Product A is available to anyone. Product A has copyright protection just as does now because the source code is published. No additional expenses.
Product B is published under a proprietary license. The source code is not published. They are given two choices.
Choice one: Put the source code on deposit (at their expense) with the copyright office. At the expiration of the copyright limit, the source code will be released to the public.
Choice two: Use obsufication, licensing, and trickery to protect their product as best they can. Since the public will never gain access to the source, they are not protected by copyright.
I have considered those points, that is why I believe as I do. But I was not very clear on them in my post.
Regarding point 1 - notice this would be only for proprietary software. If the source code is generally available, why would the author need to put it on deposit with the copyright office? On the other hand, if the source code is not generally available, you receive no protections without the proper deposit.
Regarding point 2 - Books have no hidden text, by definition the source is available. Proprietary software has additional protection of hidden text that will never go away under the current system. The public will NEVER benefit from the software, so why give the author's the benefit of copyright?
Regarding point 3 - source-code obfuscation - That is fine - that is trade secret protection. This is my whole point, unreadable source code should not receive copyright protections, because the public never receives any good.
I think that proprietary software should not receive copyright protection unless the source code is put on deposit (at the publisher's expense) with the copyright office. If the publisher does not wish to do so, let them rely on trade secret protection.
I think they are really looking for a modification of Perl... where the goal is to think like Larry Wall. If they could think better than Larry, they would have their own language. (I think it is no mistake that Larry Wall is a linguist.)
I really doubt that was his motivation, but seeing that Bruce Lehman (the chief architect behind the DMCA) is his political advisor, I would want something in writting before believing him.
Is he under the delusion he knows where every dll and other file is put when he installs something in Windows?!? Not that it is not nice to be able do something like
rpm -ql program
with Linux, but I have not seen anything similiar with windows.....
The only reason you can say that is because you have enough money and education for it to be a moral decision for you (but not enough education and experience to know better). The people who live in those conditions know of no other way of life. I would suggest you try traveling to a third world country and living with some of the poor people there before calling them immoral.
You don't understand the economics of a poor agrarian society. It is in their best interests to have a large number of children because:
Many infants and children do not reach adulthood
It's their only source of cheap labor
It also serves as their retirement plan (Hopefully one or more of the children will do well enough to support them living with them in old age - these are not people with 401Ks who move to a Florida retirement community.)
Anything that can be done to help their (or their children's) education levels is often better than any other source of help they might receive.
I wonder about how else this may be looked at. I think most reasonable people would say that any program that went looking for computers to infect would be a bad virus.
So, what if it was only reactionary, that is it only attempted to infect computers that initiated contact and attempted to infect it first? Then your computer would only be acting in self defense. This idea could even be extended beyond simple worm contact, for example someone could conceivably write a sendmail milter that reacted to spam by attacking (no, don't want to use that word - cleaning) the computer that was acting as relay. Maybe this milter could check for a few common viruses and vulnerbilities, and if it could not find one that it could fix, simply format the hard drive of the offending machine.
I do not think any of these ideas are morally justifiable, I agree with you that all viruses are bad, but I do also fear that things are heading in that direction. Funny thing is, it appears to me that most of these things would not be issues if immoral people could not make money with spam. Who knows, maybe once all the world's spam issues are taken care of though, the spammers will turn their attentions to CC theft with keystroke loggers.
I wonder if Google could get in trouble by redoing the search engine to respond to MyDoom queries with random, valid email addresses from the microsoft.com domain... I mean, why not let the machines write home? I suppose they could occasionally list abuse@ftc.gov and a few other choice ones as well.
That leads back to the old joke - "It's only free if your time's worth nothing...."
Talk about coming full circle....
Actually, I think the TCO for most organizations to run Linux vs Windows is actually about equal. The difference being - What do you wish to invest your money in:
+ A quality, knowledgable IT staff who tailor solutions for your company and receive a decent salary and benefits in return or... + Bill Gates bank account
Slashdot Mirror
I will believe microsoft is concerned about security when they expose their own OS and software for public services like web, ftp, and smtp. I will even give them credit for honestly trying when they only hide these services behind firewalls running their own OS.
microsoft exploited Kerberos as well, and it's my understanding that if Ted T'so and the other developers had it to do over again, they would have licensed it under the GPL rather than trusting microsoft to play nice (which they still have not.)
I think what will be funny will be the future "Good Thing", when Microsoft stops allowing activation of XP so that customers are forced to upgrade to the newest, more secure version of their software rather than reinstall their old version of XP. I wonder how many companies that are enjoying the ability to run old apps on DOS/Win95/Win98 are thinking of that implication before upgrading?
What we need is for one of the guys (Michael Robertson?) who got so wealthy off the dot com bubble to set up legitimate content for the AARP crowd. This could be easily done by setting up a large trust for a major university's symphony program. In exchange, all performances would be recorded, ripped to mp3, licensed under the creative commons, and made available on p2p networks. If they could then get the 65+ crowd used to the idea of sharing, all of this other nonsense would go away quickly.
Your wrong, his best quote is:
"...the best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system." -- Bill Gates.
Bricklin sent waves of laughter through the auditorium by reading a passage from Lammers' interview with Bill Gates in which the young Microsoft founder explained that his work on different versions of Microsoft's BASIC compiler was shaped by looking at how other programmers had gone about the same task. Gates went on to say that young programmers don't need computer science degrees: "The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems."
Bricklin finished reading Gates' words and announced, with an impish smile, "This is where Gates and [Richard] Stallman agree!"
Source: Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers
(1986), ISBN 0914845713
I will try to make this more clear. Product A is released under the GPL. The source code for Product A is available to anyone. Product A has copyright protection just as does now because the source code is published. No additional expenses.
Product B is published under a proprietary license. The source code is not published. They are given two choices.
I have considered those points, that is why I believe as I do. But I was not very clear on them in my post.
Regarding point 1 - notice this would be only for proprietary software. If the source code is generally available, why would the author need to put it on deposit with the copyright office? On the other hand, if the source code is not generally available, you receive no protections without the proper deposit.
Regarding point 2 - Books have no hidden text, by definition the source is available. Proprietary software has additional protection of hidden text that will never go away under the current system. The public will NEVER benefit from the software, so why give the author's the benefit of copyright?
Regarding point 3 - source-code obfuscation - That is fine - that is trade secret protection. This is my whole point, unreadable source code should not receive copyright protections, because the public never receives any good.
I think they are really looking for a modification of Perl... where the goal is to think like Larry Wall. If they could think better than Larry, they would have their own language. (I think it is no mistake that Larry Wall is a linguist.)
I really doubt that was his motivation, but seeing that Bruce Lehman (the chief architect behind the DMCA) is his political advisor, I would want something in writting before believing him.
Another link
Emergency Brakes!?! Take off you hoser, those never work!
and as Homer would say:
No point in steering now.
OK, but there always is the so appropriately named mensa society....
The only reason you can say that is because you have enough money and education for it to be a moral decision for you (but not enough education and experience to know better). The people who live in those conditions know of no other way of life. I would suggest you try traveling to a third world country and living with some of the poor people there before calling them immoral.
- Many infants and children do not reach adulthood
- It's their only source of cheap labor
- It also serves as their retirement plan (Hopefully one or more of the children will do well enough to support them living with them in old age - these are not people with 401Ks who move to a Florida retirement community.)
Anything that can be done to help their (or their children's) education levels is often better than any other source of help they might receive.You expect a firewall to protect you from malware?
I wonder about how else this may be looked at. I think most reasonable people would say that any program that went looking for computers to infect would be a bad virus.
So, what if it was only reactionary, that is it only attempted to infect computers that initiated contact and attempted to infect it first? Then your computer would only be acting in self defense. This idea could even be extended beyond simple worm contact, for example someone could conceivably write a sendmail milter that reacted to spam by attacking (no, don't want to use that word - cleaning) the computer that was acting as relay. Maybe this milter could check for a few common viruses and vulnerbilities, and if it could not find one that it could fix, simply format the hard drive of the offending machine.
I do not think any of these ideas are morally justifiable, I agree with you that all viruses are bad, but I do also fear that things are heading in that direction. Funny thing is, it appears to me that most of these things would not be issues if immoral people could not make money with spam. Who knows, maybe once all the world's spam issues are taken care of though, the spammers will turn their attentions to CC theft with keystroke loggers.
I wonder if Google could get in trouble by redoing the search engine to respond to MyDoom queries with random, valid email addresses from the microsoft.com domain... I mean, why not let the machines write home? I suppose they could occasionally list abuse@ftc.gov and a few other choice ones as well.
That leads back to the old joke - "It's only free if your time's worth nothing...."
Talk about coming full circle....
Actually, I think the TCO for most organizations to run Linux vs Windows is actually about equal. The difference being -
What do you wish to invest your money in:
+ A quality, knowledgable IT staff who tailor solutions for your company and receive a decent salary and benefits in return
or...
+ Bill Gates bank account
So, you hope others have the same poor morals as you, and don't know enough about the history of free software to realize that the GPL was created because the firmware and drivers to a printer were proprietary.
Maybe you would be happier if you first installed Opie on your device. They just released a new SDK for that project as well....