"Senators are being paid off left and right (pun intended), the only way to fight this is to educate people who vote. Vote their asses out of office!"
Don't think there's much chance of that. Both parties are about equally friendly to RIAA/MPAA interests regarding copyright control (they have a bigger fight with censorship opponents; dirty lyrics and R-rated movies make baby Jesus cry ya know). Any elected official bold enough to defy them will likely find themselves at the receiving end of a smear job on 60 Minutes/Dateline/2020 (all owned by MPAA members). Rick Boucher must be under their radar for now being a lone voice in the wilderness and all.
They tried it before. AOL partnered with Gateway to make an internet appliance. It was pretty pricey at $599 and flopped. There may be hope yet for a web appliance device. This OEOne could try to capitalize on cheap PC OEMs who want to avoid the Microsoft tax, but give a richer user experience than say... Lindows.
"there's no compelling reason for anyone who's happy using Office to switch to a "wannabe" package"
Microsoft faces the same problem with their Office. If someone is happy using Office 2000 (or even Office 97) what reason would they have to pay to upgrade to Office XP? They really just have two choices to maintain their revenue stream: force upgrades by breaking compatibility or push for subscription licensing.
The best hope for a sale (either MS Office or an alternative) is an OEM preinstall. Antitrust settlement or not, MS still has the big OEMS by the balls, so the mom and pop white box vendors are the best hope for a preinstall of free software like Openoffice.org or Gobe.
Bullshit. The AHRA of 1992 made non-commercial home copies legal. You pay a statutory royalty on blank audio media, tapes and CD-Rs (data CD-Rs are not covered by the AHRA; giving away data CD-R copies is illegal but fair-use copies are still legal). In return you're allowed to make copies of music you borrow from friends and you can make copies of your own music to give to friends. There is a gray area of who can be considered a circle of friends of a single household, but the number is definitely more than "one".
Silly hype and a way of holding Motorola's feet to the fire to not fall behind in the CPU race. I think Motorola would just as soon ditch the desktop CPU market for the embedded market. It's expensive keeping with AMD and Intel on speed especially when your userbase is so much smaller than x86.
Sony has proven themselves time and time again deserving of a permanent boycott, but no matter how much I tell my friends to avoid Sony, they still end up drooling over whatever cool shit Sony puts out (Clie, Vaio, PS2).
Even ignoring the political issues of a boycott, their products are just not worth buying. They have good design (cool cases and good UIs), and their CRTs do look good, but their quality has gone downhill in the last 20 yrs (ask a TV repair shop if you don't believe me). It breaks just as often as the cheaper stuff, and sometimes more often (ask a Vaio laptop owner).
" 74. Other commentors express concern that individuals, particularly individual developers writing and trading code within the "open source" community, might not qualify as "entities" and so might not qualify as "ISVs" under Definition VI.I.(80) The RPFJ, however, sets no minimum size or organizational standard for an "entity." Any individual or group of individuals, whether incorporated or not, that otherwise meets the definition of "ISV" is considered to be an ISV within the meaning of the RPFJ."
" 464. Several commentors express concern that Microsoft somehow may claim that an open source developer, or a network of open source developers, or a marketer of open source software, should not be considered to meet Section VI.I's definition of an "ISV" and so should not receive the benefits and protections given to ISVs by the RPFJ.(437) The United States believes this concern is groundless. See the discussion in Section III(A), above."
Gee I wonder how many more of the commentators' concerns turn out to be groundless just like the DOJ says...
Definitely use 2.4.19 if you're running the onboard IDE on a recent Athlon chipset. 2.4.18 on my Sis735 motherboard had lots of CRC errors when I enabled DMA and it reverted to PIO4 and a pitiful 4MB/s.
It's interesting that they're trying to pursue this from a consumer rights angle. Unlike the US, Europe has had a long history of recognizing artists' moral rights as opposed to economic rights. Regardless of whether they purchased the right to create derivative works, they still have the responsiblity to clearly label that their work is altered from the original, just like in Pan and Scan home videos.
Background info here: http://www.forests.com/digitfut.html#$$moral
Under Article Six of Berne, 102 countries agree to grant to an author of another member country, regardless of the ownership of economic copyright in the works,"the right during his lifetime to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other alteration...to the work which would harm his honor or reputation."... It was crafted in mid-19th century, when author Victor Hugo (Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame) was exiled from France because of political conflicts with descendents of Napoleon Bonaparte. The thoughts Hugo sent home in his books were his virtual persona, cherished by the French, who fiercely defended Hugo's moral right to speak--and their moral right to hear-- his thoughts, unaltered by political authorities.
"a lot of games were always fooled by perfecting a single trick or strategy"
I did that on Tecmo Bowl for the NES. Picked the Bears and ran Walter Payton on every single play against the computer. Maybe one of out four times they'd pick the right defense against the run, but the other times it worked and you could beat single player pretty easily.
Still, just as today, the fun was in multiplayer. Sports and fighting games were always better on consoles than PCs and you can't fool a human player as easily.
Driving seems simple because we do it all the time, but there's an enourmous amount of visual processing going on. I can imagine one of the more difficult problems is distinguishing obstacles. There's shadows (not an obstacle at all), soft obstacles like plastic bags and water puddles, and hard obstacles like mattresses, boulders, other cars, pedestrians. There are subtle visual cues that require common sense and real life knowledge, i.e. cloudy day or no tall objects on side of road = no shadows.
I don't think there's that much iron or steel in a computer except for the case. The floppy and CDROM might have a steel case and maybe some gears and springs inside, but they're cheap enough to be considered disposable. How much steel is there in one of those shiny aluminum PC cases?
" and then report any vulnerabilities to the government (as well as the manufacturer)."
If this message from Snosoft is any indication, I wouldn't have much confidence in reporting to the government either.
From: KF To: full-disclosure@lists.netsys.com ; bugtraq@securityfocus.com ; recon@snosoft.com Sent: Wednesday, July 31, 2002 7:42 PM Subject: [Full-Disclosure] for the record... (Tru64 / Compaq)
http://www.msnbc.com/news/788216.asp?0dm=T14JT
Clarke cautioned that hackers should be responsible in reporting programming mistakes. A hacker should contact the software maker first, he said, then go to the government if the software maker does not respond soon.
--
For the record... we contacted HP(at the time Compaq), and CERT several times. I attached the original version of our su exploit (not the one that phased leaked) to NIPC and to CERT BOTH. We recieved an extremely long delay at CERT before they even responded. At that point I called CERT 2 times to see what the heck was going on and eventually I establish contact (Ian Finley). I also mailed nipc.watch@nipc.gov or whatever the email address on their page was. They didn't mail back... no auto responder or nothing. ( I mailed the back weeks later and said I was shocked that I got no response and still got nothing back). I then called the NIPC hotline 3 times. The first 2 times I called I spoke to someone that should have been flopping whoppers "uhhhh a non-executable computer security what... let me send you to so and so's voicemail". Then I called back a week later and gave them the CERT vu numbers (after CERT finally responed). I left my cell phone number on someones voicemail again at NIPC... no one called me back.
I deeply regret the fact that one of my team members plagerized another and leaked some code but my god people WE TRYED to give SEVERAL people a heads up!
The VPN ban sucks, but if that gets more common, more vendors will start doing UDP encapsulation of their VPN traffic instead of using GRE and ESP. Checkpoint and HP Netstructure (formerly Intel, formerly Shiva) both support it now.
Well this guy Howard Schmidt also works for the executive branch as "vice chairman of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. According to this article on Security Focus, he has been touring the country, proclaiming the dangers of "zero-day viruses" and "affinity worms" that will create the kind of havoc that nothing else short of a nuclear exchange could cause."
Any networkable device that's easily programmed could do the same thing. They say the Dreamcast is cheap enough to be disposable since you wouldn't be going back to retrieve the probe. Only problem with this plan is that while Dreamcasts are plentiful and cheap, the ethernet adapter is rare and expensive (over $100 on Ebay). Might as well go dumpster diving to find some 486 laptops.
You mean like the flight simulator in Excel 97? Sure that counts as a harmless Easter Egg, rather than a Trojan. It's hard to say what percentage of easter eggs are inserted with management approval, but if we assume at least a few of them are unauthorized, you can see it can't be too hard to sneak a trojan or backdoor into closed source software. Probably the best (or worst) example would be the Interbase Backdoor, Secret for Six Years, Revealed in Source.
Depends on what kind of science and engineering work you want the workstation for. Mathematica, Matlab or a homegrown numerical simulation run on just about any ole' system, and the raw processor power of x86 has the edge there. If you have big data sets and need 64bit addressing, that rules out x86 and Apple. If it's 3D CAD, you'll need a good OpenGL accelerator (not a gaming card) and it has to run your favorite CAD software.
Any storage mechanism has its safety downside. If it's not a 36000rpm flywhell, it'll be a compressed gas cylinder or a chemical battery with lots of nasty stuff you don't want leaking out- acid, lithium, or my favorite hot molten sodium and sulfer.
Safe except for the time it was sabotaged in "The Man Who Sold The Moon". They stopped just the center high speed belt and the next slower belt was still whizzing by at 50 mph.
Yeah, Win2K is much better, but 95/98 sure is a brittle OS when dealing with cruft. In heavy use 95/98 starts crashing and freezing randomly after about 6 months to a year. I still dual boot to 98SE because there's a few games that refuse to run in 2000. After the last format and reinstall I decided to only boot to 98 when absolutely necessary. By limiting the hours that it runs, hopefully it'll last longer.
Storing the configs in lots of little.ini files or conf files in/etc is more robust and fail safe than 2 huge registry files. Let's say the computer has a hard poweroff, maybe from a power outage or a hard lockup from buggy drivers. Despite claims of NTFS being journaled, there will be filesystem corruption. which brings out 2 big problems with the registry:
- All the eggs in one basket: With.ini and config files, only a few files are likely to be open at one time and likely to be corrupted. This limits the damage. With the registry files you're outta luck if restore from.bak files doesn't work. Admittedly I haven't seen many such errors on Win2K, but Win95 was a crapshoot every time you installed a new driver.
- Opacity of binary config files: With a text config file you can go look at the files reported to be damaged, and it's pretty obvious if they're corrupt; they'd be truncated or garbled. Filesystem corruption happens a sector at a time. What can you do with the registry assuming the system even boots up.
So pay cash for the camcorder and start posting free movies on the Internet with the "personal" watermark. It'll never get traced to the owner, and I'd be very impressed if the DRM could recognize a studio watermark recording off a projection in a theater. Sure they could restrict the personal watermarks but people won't put up with the inconvenience of DRM on their kids' home videos.
If they really wanted to catch the owner they could track the serial number to the store that sold it and hope they kept surveillance tapes that long, but then they'll buy used or steal it off the docks.
Slashdot Mirror
"Senators are being paid off left and right (pun intended), the only way to fight this is to educate people who vote. Vote their asses out of office!"
Don't think there's much chance of that. Both parties are about equally friendly to RIAA/MPAA interests regarding copyright control (they have a bigger fight with censorship opponents; dirty lyrics and R-rated movies make baby Jesus cry ya know). Any elected official bold enough to defy them will likely find themselves at the receiving end of a smear job on 60 Minutes/Dateline/2020 (all owned by MPAA members). Rick Boucher must be under their radar for now being a lone voice in the wilderness and all.
They tried it before. AOL partnered with Gateway to make an internet appliance. It was pretty pricey at $599 and flopped. There may be hope yet for a web appliance device. This OEOne could try to capitalize on cheap PC OEMs who want to avoid the Microsoft tax, but give a richer user experience than say... Lindows.
"there's no compelling reason for anyone who's happy using Office to switch to a "wannabe" package"
Microsoft faces the same problem with their Office. If someone is happy using Office 2000 (or even Office 97) what reason would they have to pay to upgrade to Office XP? They really just have two choices to maintain their revenue stream: force upgrades by breaking compatibility or push for subscription licensing.
The best hope for a sale (either MS Office or an alternative) is an OEM preinstall. Antitrust settlement or not, MS still has the big OEMS by the balls, so the mom and pop white box vendors are the best hope for a preinstall of free software like Openoffice.org or Gobe.
Bullshit. The AHRA of 1992 made non-commercial home copies legal. You pay a statutory royalty on blank audio media, tapes and CD-Rs (data CD-Rs are not covered by the AHRA; giving away data CD-R copies is illegal but fair-use copies are still legal). In return you're allowed to make copies of music you borrow from friends and you can make copies of your own music to give to friends. There is a gray area of who can be considered a circle of friends of a single household, but the number is definitely more than "one".
Silly hype and a way of holding Motorola's feet to the fire to not fall behind in the CPU race. I think Motorola would just as soon ditch the desktop CPU market for the embedded market. It's expensive keeping with AMD and Intel on speed especially when your userbase is so much smaller than x86.
Sony has proven themselves time and time again deserving of a permanent boycott, but no matter how much I tell my friends to avoid Sony, they still end up drooling over whatever cool shit Sony puts out (Clie, Vaio, PS2).
Even ignoring the political issues of a boycott, their products are just not worth buying. They have good design (cool cases and good UIs), and their CRTs do look good, but their quality has gone downhill in the last 20 yrs (ask a TV repair shop if you don't believe me). It breaks just as often as the cheaper stuff, and sometimes more often (ask a Vaio laptop owner).
This article about the DOJ's response to the Tunney Act comments gives some useful background info.
This reponse from the DOJ is especially damning because it contradicts the requirement of having a DUNS number to submit the NDA.
from here:
" 74. Other commentors express concern that individuals, particularly individual developers writing and trading code within the "open source" community, might not qualify as "entities" and so might not qualify as "ISVs" under Definition VI.I.(80) The RPFJ, however, sets no minimum size or organizational standard for an "entity." Any individual or group of individuals, whether incorporated or not, that otherwise meets the definition of "ISV" is considered to be an ISV within the meaning of the RPFJ."
and here:
" 464. Several commentors express concern that Microsoft somehow may claim that an open source developer, or a network of open source developers, or a marketer of open source software, should not be considered to meet Section VI.I's definition of an "ISV" and so should not receive the benefits and protections given to ISVs by the RPFJ.(437) The United States believes this concern is groundless. See the discussion in Section III(A), above."
Gee I wonder how many more of the commentators' concerns turn out to be groundless just like the DOJ says...
Definitely use 2.4.19 if you're running the onboard IDE on a recent Athlon chipset. 2.4.18 on my Sis735 motherboard had lots of CRC errors when I enabled DMA and it reverted to PIO4 and a pitiful 4MB/s.
It's interesting that they're trying to pursue this from a consumer rights angle. Unlike the US, Europe has had a long history of recognizing artists' moral rights as opposed to economic rights. Regardless of whether they purchased the right to create derivative works, they still have the responsiblity to clearly label that their work is altered from the original, just like in Pan and Scan home videos.
...
Background info here: http://www.forests.com/digitfut.html#$$moral
Under Article Six of Berne, 102 countries agree to grant to an author of another member country, regardless of the ownership of economic copyright in the works,"the right during his lifetime to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other alteration...to the work which would harm his honor or reputation."
It was crafted in mid-19th century, when author Victor Hugo (Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame) was exiled from France because of political conflicts with descendents of Napoleon Bonaparte. The thoughts Hugo sent home in his books were his virtual persona, cherished by the French, who fiercely defended Hugo's moral right to speak--and their moral right to hear-- his thoughts, unaltered by political authorities.
It's more likely those 80% are dead or fake addresses. Either deleted accounts or addresses harvested from a web spider poisoning script.
"a lot of games were always fooled by perfecting a single trick or strategy"
I did that on Tecmo Bowl for the NES. Picked the Bears and ran Walter Payton on every single play against the computer. Maybe one of out four times they'd pick the right defense against the run, but the other times it worked and you could beat single player pretty easily.
Still, just as today, the fun was in multiplayer. Sports and fighting games were always better on consoles than PCs and you can't fool a human player as easily.
Driving seems simple because we do it all the time, but there's an enourmous amount of visual processing going on. I can imagine one of the more difficult problems is distinguishing obstacles. There's shadows (not an obstacle at all), soft obstacles like plastic bags and water puddles, and hard obstacles like mattresses, boulders, other cars, pedestrians. There are subtle visual cues that require common sense and real life knowledge, i.e. cloudy day or no tall objects on side of road = no shadows.
I don't think there's that much iron or steel in a computer except for the case. The floppy and CDROM might have a steel case and maybe some gears and springs inside, but they're cheap enough to be considered disposable. How much steel is there in one of those shiny aluminum PC cases?
" and then report any vulnerabilities to the government (as well as the manufacturer)."
... no auto responder or nothing. ( I mailed the back weeks later and said I was shocked that I got no response and still got nothing back). I then called the NIPC hotline 3 times. The first 2 times I called I spoke to someone that should have been flopping whoppers "uhhhh a non-executable computer security what... let me send you to so and so's voicemail". Then I called back a week later and gave them the CERT vu numbers (after CERT finally responed). I left my cell phone number on someones voicemail again at NIPC... no one called me back.
If this message from Snosoft is any indication, I wouldn't have much confidence in reporting to the government either.
From: KF
To: full-disclosure@lists.netsys.com ; bugtraq@securityfocus.com ; recon@snosoft.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 31, 2002 7:42 PM
Subject: [Full-Disclosure] for the record... (Tru64 / Compaq)
http://www.msnbc.com/news/788216.asp?0dm=T14JT
Clarke cautioned that hackers should be responsible in reporting programming mistakes. A hacker should contact the software maker first, he said, then go to the government if the software maker does not respond soon.
--
For the record... we contacted HP(at the time Compaq), and CERT several times. I attached the original version of our su exploit (not the one that phased leaked) to NIPC and to CERT BOTH. We recieved an extremely long delay at CERT before they even responded. At that point I called CERT 2 times to see what the heck was going on and eventually I establish contact (Ian Finley). I also mailed nipc.watch@nipc.gov or whatever the email address on their page was. They didn't mail back
I deeply regret the fact that one of my team members plagerized another and leaked some code but my god people WE TRYED to give SEVERAL people a heads up!
-KF
The VPN ban sucks, but if that gets more common, more vendors will start doing UDP encapsulation of their VPN traffic instead of using GRE and ESP. Checkpoint and HP Netstructure (formerly Intel, formerly Shiva) both support it now.
Well this guy Howard Schmidt also works for the executive branch as "vice chairman of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. According to this article on Security Focus, he has been touring the country, proclaiming the dangers of "zero-day viruses" and "affinity worms" that will create the kind of havoc that nothing else short of a nuclear exchange could cause."
Any networkable device that's easily programmed could do the same thing. They say the Dreamcast is cheap enough to be disposable since you wouldn't be going back to retrieve the probe. Only problem with this plan is that while Dreamcasts are plentiful and cheap, the ethernet adapter is rare and expensive (over $100 on Ebay). Might as well go dumpster diving to find some 486 laptops.
You mean like the flight simulator in Excel 97? Sure that counts as a harmless Easter Egg, rather than a Trojan. It's hard to say what percentage of easter eggs are inserted with management approval, but if we assume at least a few of them are unauthorized, you can see it can't be too hard to sneak a trojan or backdoor into closed source software. Probably the best (or worst) example would be the Interbase Backdoor, Secret for Six Years, Revealed in Source.
Depends on what kind of science and engineering work you want the workstation for. Mathematica, Matlab or a homegrown numerical simulation run on just about any ole' system, and the raw processor power of x86 has the edge there. If you have big data sets and need 64bit addressing, that rules out x86 and Apple. If it's 3D CAD, you'll need a good OpenGL accelerator (not a gaming card) and it has to run your favorite CAD software.
Any storage mechanism has its safety downside. If it's not a 36000rpm flywhell, it'll be a compressed gas cylinder or a chemical battery with lots of nasty stuff you don't want leaking out- acid, lithium, or my favorite hot molten sodium and sulfer.
Safe except for the time it was sabotaged in "The Man Who Sold The Moon". They stopped just the center high speed belt and the next slower belt was still whizzing by at 50 mph.
Yeah, Win2K is much better, but 95/98 sure is a brittle OS when dealing with cruft. In heavy use 95/98 starts crashing and freezing randomly after about 6 months to a year. I still dual boot to 98SE because there's a few games that refuse to run in 2000. After the last format and reinstall I decided to only boot to 98 when absolutely necessary. By limiting the hours that it runs, hopefully it'll last longer.
Storing the configs in lots of little .ini files or conf files in /etc is more robust and fail safe than 2 huge registry files. Let's say the computer has a hard poweroff, maybe from a power outage or a hard lockup from buggy drivers. Despite claims of NTFS being journaled, there will be filesystem corruption. which brings out 2 big problems with the registry:
.ini and config files, only a few files are likely to be open at one time and likely to be corrupted. This limits the damage. With the registry files you're outta luck if restore from .bak files doesn't work. Admittedly I haven't seen many such errors on Win2K, but Win95 was a crapshoot every time you installed a new driver.
- All the eggs in one basket: With
- Opacity of binary config files: With a text config file you can go look at the files reported to be damaged, and it's pretty obvious if they're corrupt; they'd be truncated or garbled. Filesystem corruption happens a sector at a time. What can you do with the registry assuming the system even boots up.
"EPIC hasn't been proved to be any less expensive to manufacture than x86"
Excuse me? McKinley (Itanium2) is supposed to have a 464 mm2 die size, while Opteron will be half the size of a P4, about 105 mm2.
So pay cash for the camcorder and start posting free movies on the Internet with the "personal" watermark. It'll never get traced to the owner, and I'd be very impressed if the DRM could recognize a studio watermark recording off a projection in a theater. Sure they could restrict the personal watermarks but people won't put up with the inconvenience of DRM on their kids' home videos.
If they really wanted to catch the owner they could track the serial number to the store that sold it and hope they kept surveillance tapes that long, but then they'll buy used or steal it off the docks.