Our of curiosity, when someone does sit on your network for a few hours, uses some stolen credit cards, uses a script to hack into a few hundred systems, launches a distributed denial-of-service attack against a few government system, maybe sends out a bundle of spam, and the feds come knocking on your door, what do you plan on telling them?
It would also drastically reduce the spam problem as well.
How will encouraging open Wi-Fi networks (or at least discouraging prosecution of open Wi-Fi operators for crimes committed through their networks) reduce spam?
As these things become more and more ubiquitous, and as operators are not held liable for the anonymous acts performed through their networks, I cannot believe that the amount of spam will go down. If anything, it would go way up as spammers discover they will never be caught.
It's not about communication, it's about initiating an attack.
When you have access to the Internet, you can use that to run a few script kiddie exploits, collect a few hundred (thousand) DDoS zombies, and launch a crippling attack.
Using a pay phone just gives you anonymity at the physical layer. By the time you're at the IP layer, you've signed on with an ISP, who presumably has some identifying information about you (though it could easily be stolen).
Using an open Wi-Fi network, you are completely anonymous. You are anonymous at the physical layer (could be hiding in an alley where no one can see you) and the link layer (MAC addresses can be changed). You have obtained an IP address with no form of authentication or authorization. When the feds trace back the attack (or the release of the worm, whatever crime it is), they are stopped cold at the operator of that Wi-Fi network. They can go no farther. (Assuming you've high-tailed it out of there by then.)
This fact is what they're wanting to do something about. Are we really prepared to give immunity to operators of free, anonymous, open Wi-Fi networks for crimes that people commit over them? If so, expect to see the number of prosecutions for electronic crimes drop to nearly nothing in the next few years, as criminals simply relocate their operations to take advantage of this anonymous Internet access everyone is so generously providing.
If you think spam and DDoS attacks were bad before, you haven't seen nothin' yet.
The big problem is, who is going to educate the politicians?
I can't believe this is being asked!
Who? YOU ARE!
Politicians by their very nature do not have an education in every single subject in the world. They are there to do what they can to serve the interests of their constituents, and got elected on that basis.
Most likely, they are not technically savvy.
It is the responsibility of their constituents to ensure that they are educated about every piece of legislation or issue of the week. If you think that perhaps your representative might not have a firm grasp on a given subject, or might be making decisions based solely on the education they are receiving from a party that has an ulterior motive (e.g. RIAA, MPAA,.gov), you really need to step up and provide them with the missing facts.
For many representatives, it can take less time to e-mail them than it does for you to post a comment to Slashdot. Or you can take a few minutes more and write them a real letter (addresses are available at that same link).
Stop whining about how your representatives are uneducated about a specific knowledge area. Educate them!
As a voter, it is YOUR PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY to see to it that those who claim to represent you actually do.
Don't think of it as "you are in office to represent me, so dammit, do what I say." Your letter writing campaign shouldn't be just to say "this is what I feel, now represent me." You should be working to educate your representatives, not tell them what to do. Tell them why these things are bad (or good).
They already have enough letters from people saying "represent me, do what I tell you." Give them something they can use to make up their own mind with, don't just send them something that'll end up as a tick-mark under the "those in favor of issue XYZ" column.
Does that guy honestly believe that getting into one Wi-Fi network can allow someone to bring down the entire Internet? And if he does, hm, maybe he should look at the original ARPA spec
There's a few other specs you may have missed, including things like TELNET and SSH, as well as some security topics (commonly referred to as "r00ting" or "hax0ring").
Few types of attacks can originate from a Wi-Fi network and be able to take down the infrastructure (though you could release a worm from such a place..), but you can certainly start running your exploit-of-the-week on such a network, nab a few hundred (thousand?) hosts, and initiate a distributed attack from your conveniently anonymous connection.
What do you plan on telling the feds when they track this back to your network? "It wasn't me, I swear! Sure I have the technical abilities, look at my l33t collection of Internet gear. They must have gotten in through my free publicly-available anonymous Wi-Fi access point!"
Do you really feel that you shouldn't share some of the fault for this, assuming they buy your story?
Except when you track a bomb plot back to a homeless shelther, chances are, someone knows who you're talking about.
With an open Wi-Fi network, when you trace an illegal act back to it, the operator of that network probably has no clue who you're talking about. The trail will consistently end at the operator providing that anonymous connectivity.
In short, to commit an Internet crime without getting caught, all you have to do is find a "generous" Slashdot kid with an open Wi-Fi network and commit your acts through that.
Instead, I see that as providing a valuable public service, for example to enable those working for legitimate political change to communicate among themselves without fear of reprisal.
So when someone abuses your wide-open WiFi network to commit a crime (be it releasing a destructive worm onto the Internet, hacking into someone else's system, stealing credit cards, using stolen credit cards, etc.), what do you suggest should happen?
When the feds knock on your door and say they traced the activity directly back to your network, what are you going to say? "Nope, sorry guys, wasn't me, but I do operate a freely available, anonymous wireless Internet gateway, so anyone could have done it."
Are we really going to sit here and say that that defense is going to be completely acceptable? "Oh shucks, well thanks for taking the time to talk to us, looks like we'll never catch him."
This is insane. That's opening the door for any criminal to commit his crimes completely free of possibility of ever getting caught. Slashdot kids that want to have an open Wi-Fi network can do so without fear, without a care that their network will be abused, and every time the feds knock on their door they can just say the same thing to get rid of them.
At some point you really have to wonder if the provider of an anonymous resource like this isn't really abetting the crimes being committed through it.
I don't believe at all that one guy with a laptop on an open AP could "bring the net down"...
No, but he could introducce a virus or a worm from that point.
I've been saying this for months: if you run a wide-open AP, with the full knowledge that you are providing anonymous connectivity to others, you should not be surprised when someone uses that open AP to perform an illegal act, and the feds trace that act back to you.
If they can't nail you for the illegal act, there is definitely an argument that you aided and abetted. You knowingly left your AP wide open for others to use and "conveniently" failed to provide a mechanism for authentication.
So what happens? Would you rather the feds say, "Oh shucks, looks like it was an anonymous user using the 'Net through this fine citizen's free Wi-Fi resource, guess we'll never catch them."
This way lay anarchy. That's basically saying any Internet crime is now untraceable and unpunishable. Just find one of those Slashdot kids that has an open Wi-Fi network and commit crimes to your heart's content.
It's not just about electronic terrorism, or even the coordination of traditional terrorist activities.
I disagree here.. DNS is meant to attach a symbolic name to a set of Internet hosts. It was never intended to be a locator for an organization, to say nothing about a label about what kind of content that happens to be located on one host using one Internet protocol.
DNS is being horribly stretched to do things it was never intended to do. If the US Government wanted a "white list" to say "these sites are kid-safe", they should just create a freakin' white list. IE and other browsers do have content filtering systems built in. Why are we not using them?
Copyright only protects an an original expression, not an unoriginal alphabetized list of phone numbers.
Firstly, I'm not trying to take WalMart's side, I'm just trying to explain how they might have a case.
Secondly, I totally agree that raw facts are uncopyrightable (as phone numbers are). Keep in mind that collections of facts (like a phone book) are copyrightable.
Lastly, unpublished prices not in use are merely words and phrases as part of a greater work. No, that work is not "literary" in the traditional sense and probably has no value as such, but it's still a work of text that describes the company's intents, and is not simply text that relays pricing information, and that does have value. It's confidential material--confidential text. Grabbing the juicy bits out of that text, assuming that text can be copyrighted, is infringement, and it shouldn't matter if that text consists of a series of numbers or a line of prose.
And before someone says, "So let's copyright $9.99 and get rich off the royalties," you're going to have to prove a) that someone else's use of "$9.99" is derived exclusively from your copyrighted work; and b) that their use is indeed infringing and not fair use. These are just the arguments the retail chains are going to have to deal with.
Personally, I can see valid arguments on both sides, but most of the rest of Slashdot seems to be missing that other side.
Why would all of these retail chains be making the same copyright claim if there wasn't some merit to their argument? Really, that's for a court to decide, but don't be so quick to dismiss it based on your interpretation of copyright law.
And if I'm reading things correctly, I think the copyright claim stems not from the fact that they merely reposted prices, but that they reposted the full text of their advertisements. If that's correct, then all of this discussion about whether "$9.99" is copyrightable is moot, since it's really the greater work that they're claiming has been infringed. Someone going through a copyrighted book and saying, "this author used the following words in this work:..." is a perfect counter-example to my statements above, so this scenario seems like it makes the most sense.
Trade secrets in their "raw" form are nothing more than facts, which may not be copyrightable. But if you write up a large user's guide for some secret internal system, that user's guide becomes both trade secret information and a copyrightable book like any other in my eyes. I don't know why the law would make that uncopyrightable.
revealing trade secrets is illegal or at least against contract
Illegal, no, but presumably those who have access to trade secrets are bound by countract/NDA not to reveal it, so against contract: yes.
But trade secrets can still be copyrighted. Look at the Church of Scientology.
They can't enforce their NDA until they know who released the information, and they're using copyright law to figure that out.
Note that I'm not trying to sit on the side of WalMart or any of the other companies here, I'm just pointing out how they might have a case. Slashdot frequently needs a devil's advocate.
It would be more akin to you walking into a store and finding the music they're playing over the PA system to be either offensive, loud, or just annoying. Sucks to be you. Just leave.
If, however, someone dressed as a store rep walked up to you and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but your cell phone is emitting too much radiation. You really need to purchase this antenna shield," that would be something else entirely.
1. You can certainly claim copyright over the picture you took.
2. If you want to assert that the $14.95 is a work that you want to copyright, you're free to try it. You're going to have difficulties trying to enforce that copyright, though, since you'd have to convince a judge that any "infringing use" was actually of your $14.95 and not of someone else's (perhaps factual) $14.95. With real literary works, that proof is usually pretty easy (unnecessary), but you'll probably have to work a little harder here.
Firstly, a collection of facts can be copyrighted. This is why telephone books are copyrighted. There's nothing stopping you from picking and choosing bits of data and assembling your own collection, however, provided it's not just repackaging most of the collection in its original form.
Secondly, if prices were not yet published and not yet current, then they do not represent facts at all, they represent opinions/statements of intent, which should be copyrightable.
One might argue, though, that if the prices were not yet published and not yet current, then they did not represent factual data yet. If they were not facts, then they were opinions (statements of intent), which can be copyrighted.
A collection of facts is copyrightable, but if you go through this collection and pick and choose data from it and post it in another form, you are not violating copyright. It would suck to be a dictionary company or someone looking up and posting a phone number out of the phone book if it were.
The only possible way I could see these companies having a case is if the price data was not yet public. If it's not announced, and the prices are not yet current, then it's not factual data yet. It's a statement of intent (and something similar to a trade secret) at that point, in the form of a price. I can see how someone might consider that to be copyrightable.
Most people don't consider this science fiction, but I think Stephen King's "Dark Tower" (and related) novels all mix a certain element of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
For those that haven't read these books, the Dark Tower series takes place in a parallel universe, similar to our own, except set a thousand years after we would have wiped ourselves out (after making a few hundred years of additional scientific progress). The core concept is that there are an infinite number of universes, many of which impinge on each other, and all held together by these mysterious "beams" centered on the Dark Tower. There is a villain trying to destroy those beams and presumably lay waste to the various universes held by them.
The books are excellent, and the universe is very interesting, with most of the world having reverted to what we might consider technology of the "old west", lying smack in the middle of (some partially-functioning!) relics of our ancient technology. Universes "near" this one, and the way they relate to each other are all equally interesting (e.g. the Territories from the Talisman).
What makes this universe a masterpiece, though, is now King is weaving this plot into nearly every piece of fiction he's written lately. Talisman came before Dark Tower, but its sequel, Black House, connects it to the Dark Tower. Insomnia was connected. Hearts in Atlantis was connected, etc. He's basically taking one central theme (the Dark Tower universe) and is writing books about small pieces of that one major plot.
So in a way, he's not just writing a saga, or a trilogy about the Dark Tower, here. He's inventing a universe and we're getting peeks into that universe from many angles, watching the Dark Tower plot unfold as a bystander just as much as we do by reading the actual Dark Tower books. I just hope he gets around to finishing it some day!
I don't really understand all of the comments saying a redundant network infrastructure is bad/stupid/etc.
If your network is critical to your business, you should absolutely consider backing up every bit of that network with one (or more?) redundant components. This means every router should have a redundant pair, every physical network link should be redundant (including how it's routed through the building), every firewall, switch, etc. If you have mission-critical servers, they should have two NIC cards. Upgrades should never occur on both "sides" of the infrastructure at the same time, and both sides should be capable of running alone.
Not only does this type of configuration resist failures, but upgrades or configuration changes to the A or B side should never impact the other side, and if it does, you should be able to shut down the offending sections without impacting availability.
If your network staff doesn't understand these concepts, you desperately need to train them better. If the expense cannot be justified by management, then that's a business decision and when failures like this occur, they should not be surprised.
Re:Always this argument...
on
The Wireless City
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You bet you can be sued, unless you can demonstrate that someone else used your network to do harm. Here's the tricky bit, though: did you knowingly facilitate that user's illegal acts?
If your network was broken into and someone did these things without your knowledge, you certainly can't be held liable for his acts. If you ran your network responsibly, you can't even be called negeligent.
But when you open up your wireless LAN and let any and every Joe get Internet access through your network, and you deliberately make no effort to authenticate or gather sufficient information to a) track down abusers; or b) prevent abuse, one might suggest that you are acting as an accessory to whatever crimes are committed through your network.
It's possible, though, that if this is going to be treated like any other public utility, that the city is going to be OK with the fact that they'll just need to track these users down in real-time, by triangulating positions and using surveillance cameras, though.
And keep in mind that this is just the legal end of things. Generally when any customer signs a contract with a network provider, that contract includes bits about the customer not violating the ISP's terms of service, etc., etc. It isn't too far-fetched to assume that the city is subject to one or more ISPs' terms of use, and that they'll have to enforce those same terms on the general public that uses these public networks. If they are unable to reliably do so, the hosting ISP could be perfectly justified in enforcing penalties in the contract, perhaps including disconnection of service.
There's no reason to assume that just because it's a "city" doing this that they'll be exempt from having to honor an ISP's terms of service. But who knows? Maybe they're expecting to be large enough that they won't consider themselves customers of ISP's so much as peers...
One of the things that makes the Internet great is the wealth of content freely available online. Some might say that the signal-to-noise ratio is rather low, but having funds to run a web site does not automatically mean you're improving that ratio.
This freely-available content has to be paid for by somebody. Usually it's those wanting to make that content available, and unless they have some means to offset the costs of doing so, some will be unable to do it. This is why most free sites resort to advertising over paid memberships.
Yes, "free" sites need to take into account the jerks that want to rape their site without looking at the promotional content as well. This needs to be addressed when they're coming up with a pseudo-business model (keeping in mind that many sites that carry ads are not remotely commercial). But all you're really doing is increasing the bandwidth-to-advertising revenue ratio, and are having a direct impact on that site's ability to stay online.
Yes, it's an issue with their business model. But the only reason their business model is failing is because there are people blocking their ads. It doesn't matter that their ads may be well-placed, are not intrusive and not offensive, your ad blocker blocks them all.
This attitude, quite frankly, sucks.
Thank God we have enough people out there who do not block advertising, or else we wouldn't have Slashdot. Would you rather sites like Slashdot disappear (due to a "poor" business model) just because you're anti-advertising?
I would bet just the opposite. Most "script kiddies" are in fact jr. high or high school age. They have a social "elite" consisting of a few college-age kiddies that haven't let go. These are guys that would write exploits or fix broken ones and pass out to all of their kiddie friends.
However you look at it, they're all children, regardless of how old they really are. This is why we call them kiddies.
This article is fairly loaded with bias, but I'll try to make the point anyway: Use the best tool for the task.
Anyone that tells you a single operating system is the best tool for every task is an idiot. So the question becomes, which operating system is the better tool for most of your tasks?
That's entirely a question for the user: are you going to be doing a lot of Unixishy development? Is there some particular software you need to use to do your daily job? Can you afford a second computer?
I personally think it's silly to limit yourself to one OS if you can afford a second computer. Hell, I have several, most of them headless systems running Linux with a beefy Windows system that's my sole head. I use Exceed to run X apps from my Linux servers.
Slashdot Mirror
Our of curiosity, when someone does sit on your network for a few hours, uses some stolen credit cards, uses a script to hack into a few hundred systems, launches a distributed denial-of-service attack against a few government system, maybe sends out a bundle of spam, and the feds come knocking on your door, what do you plan on telling them?
It would also drastically reduce the spam problem as well.
How will encouraging open Wi-Fi networks (or at least discouraging prosecution of open Wi-Fi operators for crimes committed through their networks) reduce spam?
As these things become more and more ubiquitous, and as operators are not held liable for the anonymous acts performed through their networks, I cannot believe that the amount of spam will go down. If anything, it would go way up as spammers discover they will never be caught.
It's not about communication, it's about initiating an attack.
When you have access to the Internet, you can use that to run a few script kiddie exploits, collect a few hundred (thousand) DDoS zombies, and launch a crippling attack.
Using a pay phone just gives you anonymity at the physical layer. By the time you're at the IP layer, you've signed on with an ISP, who presumably has some identifying information about you (though it could easily be stolen).
Using an open Wi-Fi network, you are completely anonymous. You are anonymous at the physical layer (could be hiding in an alley where no one can see you) and the link layer (MAC addresses can be changed). You have obtained an IP address with no form of authentication or authorization. When the feds trace back the attack (or the release of the worm, whatever crime it is), they are stopped cold at the operator of that Wi-Fi network. They can go no farther. (Assuming you've high-tailed it out of there by then.)
This fact is what they're wanting to do something about. Are we really prepared to give immunity to operators of free, anonymous, open Wi-Fi networks for crimes that people commit over them? If so, expect to see the number of prosecutions for electronic crimes drop to nearly nothing in the next few years, as criminals simply relocate their operations to take advantage of this anonymous Internet access everyone is so generously providing.
If you think spam and DDoS attacks were bad before, you haven't seen nothin' yet.
The big problem is, who is going to educate the politicians?
.gov), you really need to step up and provide them with the missing facts.
I can't believe this is being asked!
Who? YOU ARE!
Politicians by their very nature do not have an education in every single subject in the world. They are there to do what they can to serve the interests of their constituents, and got elected on that basis.
Most likely, they are not technically savvy.
It is the responsibility of their constituents to ensure that they are educated about every piece of legislation or issue of the week. If you think that perhaps your representative might not have a firm grasp on a given subject, or might be making decisions based solely on the education they are receiving from a party that has an ulterior motive (e.g. RIAA, MPAA,
For many representatives, it can take less time to e-mail them than it does for you to post a comment to Slashdot. Or you can take a few minutes more and write them a real letter (addresses are available at that same link).
Stop whining about how your representatives are uneducated about a specific knowledge area. Educate them!
As a voter, it is YOUR PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY to see to it that those who claim to represent you actually do.
Don't think of it as "you are in office to represent me, so dammit, do what I say." Your letter writing campaign shouldn't be just to say "this is what I feel, now represent me." You should be working to educate your representatives, not tell them what to do. Tell them why these things are bad (or good).
They already have enough letters from people saying "represent me, do what I tell you." Give them something they can use to make up their own mind with, don't just send them something that'll end up as a tick-mark under the "those in favor of issue XYZ" column.
Does that guy honestly believe that getting into one Wi-Fi network can allow someone to bring down the entire Internet? And if he does, hm, maybe he should look at the original ARPA spec
There's a few other specs you may have missed, including things like TELNET and SSH, as well as some security topics (commonly referred to as "r00ting" or "hax0ring").
Few types of attacks can originate from a Wi-Fi network and be able to take down the infrastructure (though you could release a worm from such a place..), but you can certainly start running your exploit-of-the-week on such a network, nab a few hundred (thousand?) hosts, and initiate a distributed attack from your conveniently anonymous connection.
What do you plan on telling the feds when they track this back to your network? "It wasn't me, I swear! Sure I have the technical abilities, look at my l33t collection of Internet gear. They must have gotten in through my free publicly-available anonymous Wi-Fi access point!"
Do you really feel that you shouldn't share some of the fault for this, assuming they buy your story?
Except when you track a bomb plot back to a homeless shelther, chances are, someone knows who you're talking about.
With an open Wi-Fi network, when you trace an illegal act back to it, the operator of that network probably has no clue who you're talking about. The trail will consistently end at the operator providing that anonymous connectivity.
In short, to commit an Internet crime without getting caught, all you have to do is find a "generous" Slashdot kid with an open Wi-Fi network and commit your acts through that.
Do we really want to encourage this?
Instead, I see that as providing a valuable public service, for example to enable those working for legitimate political change to communicate among themselves without fear of reprisal.
So when someone abuses your wide-open WiFi network to commit a crime (be it releasing a destructive worm onto the Internet, hacking into someone else's system, stealing credit cards, using stolen credit cards, etc.), what do you suggest should happen?
When the feds knock on your door and say they traced the activity directly back to your network, what are you going to say? "Nope, sorry guys, wasn't me, but I do operate a freely available, anonymous wireless Internet gateway, so anyone could have done it."
Are we really going to sit here and say that that defense is going to be completely acceptable? "Oh shucks, well thanks for taking the time to talk to us, looks like we'll never catch him."
This is insane. That's opening the door for any criminal to commit his crimes completely free of possibility of ever getting caught. Slashdot kids that want to have an open Wi-Fi network can do so without fear, without a care that their network will be abused, and every time the feds knock on their door they can just say the same thing to get rid of them.
At some point you really have to wonder if the provider of an anonymous resource like this isn't really abetting the crimes being committed through it.
I don't believe at all that one guy with a laptop on an open AP could "bring the net down"...
No, but he could introducce a virus or a worm from that point.
I've been saying this for months: if you run a wide-open AP, with the full knowledge that you are providing anonymous connectivity to others, you should not be surprised when someone uses that open AP to perform an illegal act, and the feds trace that act back to you.
If they can't nail you for the illegal act, there is definitely an argument that you aided and abetted. You knowingly left your AP wide open for others to use and "conveniently" failed to provide a mechanism for authentication.
So what happens? Would you rather the feds say, "Oh shucks, looks like it was an anonymous user using the 'Net through this fine citizen's free Wi-Fi resource, guess we'll never catch them."
This way lay anarchy. That's basically saying any Internet crime is now untraceable and unpunishable. Just find one of those Slashdot kids that has an open Wi-Fi network and commit crimes to your heart's content.
It's not just about electronic terrorism, or even the coordination of traditional terrorist activities.
I disagree here.. DNS is meant to attach a symbolic name to a set of Internet hosts. It was never intended to be a locator for an organization, to say nothing about a label about what kind of content that happens to be located on one host using one Internet protocol.
DNS is being horribly stretched to do things it was never intended to do. If the US Government wanted a "white list" to say "these sites are kid-safe", they should just create a freakin' white list. IE and other browsers do have content filtering systems built in. Why are we not using them?
Copyright only protects an an original expression, not an unoriginal alphabetized list of phone numbers.
..." is a perfect counter-example to my statements above, so this scenario seems like it makes the most sense.
Firstly, I'm not trying to take WalMart's side, I'm just trying to explain how they might have a case.
Secondly, I totally agree that raw facts are uncopyrightable (as phone numbers are). Keep in mind that collections of facts (like a phone book) are copyrightable.
Lastly, unpublished prices not in use are merely words and phrases as part of a greater work. No, that work is not "literary" in the traditional sense and probably has no value as such, but it's still a work of text that describes the company's intents, and is not simply text that relays pricing information, and that does have value. It's confidential material--confidential text. Grabbing the juicy bits out of that text, assuming that text can be copyrighted, is infringement, and it shouldn't matter if that text consists of a series of numbers or a line of prose.
And before someone says, "So let's copyright $9.99 and get rich off the royalties," you're going to have to prove a) that someone else's use of "$9.99" is derived exclusively from your copyrighted work; and b) that their use is indeed infringing and not fair use. These are just the arguments the retail chains are going to have to deal with.
Personally, I can see valid arguments on both sides, but most of the rest of Slashdot seems to be missing that other side.
Why would all of these retail chains be making the same copyright claim if there wasn't some merit to their argument? Really, that's for a court to decide, but don't be so quick to dismiss it based on your interpretation of copyright law.
And if I'm reading things correctly, I think the copyright claim stems not from the fact that they merely reposted prices, but that they reposted the full text of their advertisements. If that's correct, then all of this discussion about whether "$9.99" is copyrightable is moot, since it's really the greater work that they're claiming has been infringed. Someone going through a copyrighted book and saying, "this author used the following words in this work:
Possible, but that'd be news to me.
Trade secrets in their "raw" form are nothing more than facts, which may not be copyrightable. But if you write up a large user's guide for some secret internal system, that user's guide becomes both trade secret information and a copyrightable book like any other in my eyes. I don't know why the law would make that uncopyrightable.
revealing trade secrets is illegal or at least against contract
Illegal, no, but presumably those who have access to trade secrets are bound by countract/NDA not to reveal it, so against contract: yes.
But trade secrets can still be copyrighted. Look at the Church of Scientology.
They can't enforce their NDA until they know who released the information, and they're using copyright law to figure that out.
Note that I'm not trying to sit on the side of WalMart or any of the other companies here, I'm just pointing out how they might have a case. Slashdot frequently needs a devil's advocate.
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
It would be more akin to you walking into a store and finding the music they're playing over the PA system to be either offensive, loud, or just annoying. Sucks to be you. Just leave.
If, however, someone dressed as a store rep walked up to you and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but your cell phone is emitting too much radiation. You really need to purchase this antenna shield," that would be something else entirely.
1. You can certainly claim copyright over the picture you took.
2. If you want to assert that the $14.95 is a work that you want to copyright, you're free to try it. You're going to have difficulties trying to enforce that copyright, though, since you'd have to convince a judge that any "infringing use" was actually of your $14.95 and not of someone else's (perhaps factual) $14.95. With real literary works, that proof is usually pretty easy (unnecessary), but you'll probably have to work a little harder here.
Firstly, a collection of facts can be copyrighted. This is why telephone books are copyrighted. There's nothing stopping you from picking and choosing bits of data and assembling your own collection, however, provided it's not just repackaging most of the collection in its original form.
Secondly, if prices were not yet published and not yet current, then they do not represent facts at all, they represent opinions/statements of intent, which should be copyrightable.
Though I am not a lawyer...
One might argue, though, that if the prices were not yet published and not yet current, then they did not represent factual data yet. If they were not facts, then they were opinions (statements of intent), which can be copyrighted.
A collection of facts is copyrightable, but if you go through this collection and pick and choose data from it and post it in another form, you are not violating copyright. It would suck to be a dictionary company or someone looking up and posting a phone number out of the phone book if it were.
The only possible way I could see these companies having a case is if the price data was not yet public. If it's not announced, and the prices are not yet current, then it's not factual data yet. It's a statement of intent (and something similar to a trade secret) at that point, in the form of a price. I can see how someone might consider that to be copyrightable.
Most people don't consider this science fiction, but I think Stephen King's "Dark Tower" (and related) novels all mix a certain element of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
For those that haven't read these books, the Dark Tower series takes place in a parallel universe, similar to our own, except set a thousand years after we would have wiped ourselves out (after making a few hundred years of additional scientific progress). The core concept is that there are an infinite number of universes, many of which impinge on each other, and all held together by these mysterious "beams" centered on the Dark Tower. There is a villain trying to destroy those beams and presumably lay waste to the various universes held by them.
The books are excellent, and the universe is very interesting, with most of the world having reverted to what we might consider technology of the "old west", lying smack in the middle of (some partially-functioning!) relics of our ancient technology. Universes "near" this one, and the way they relate to each other are all equally interesting (e.g. the Territories from the Talisman).
What makes this universe a masterpiece, though, is now King is weaving this plot into nearly every piece of fiction he's written lately. Talisman came before Dark Tower, but its sequel, Black House, connects it to the Dark Tower. Insomnia was connected. Hearts in Atlantis was connected, etc. He's basically taking one central theme (the Dark Tower universe) and is writing books about small pieces of that one major plot.
So in a way, he's not just writing a saga, or a trilogy about the Dark Tower, here. He's inventing a universe and we're getting peeks into that universe from many angles, watching the Dark Tower plot unfold as a bystander just as much as we do by reading the actual Dark Tower books. I just hope he gets around to finishing it some day!
From what I've read, the second network was already in the planning stages.
I don't really understand all of the comments saying a redundant network infrastructure is bad/stupid/etc.
If your network is critical to your business, you should absolutely consider backing up every bit of that network with one (or more?) redundant components. This means every router should have a redundant pair, every physical network link should be redundant (including how it's routed through the building), every firewall, switch, etc. If you have mission-critical servers, they should have two NIC cards. Upgrades should never occur on both "sides" of the infrastructure at the same time, and both sides should be capable of running alone.
Not only does this type of configuration resist failures, but upgrades or configuration changes to the A or B side should never impact the other side, and if it does, you should be able to shut down the offending sections without impacting availability.
If your network staff doesn't understand these concepts, you desperately need to train them better. If the expense cannot be justified by management, then that's a business decision and when failures like this occur, they should not be surprised.
You bet you can be sued, unless you can demonstrate that someone else used your network to do harm. Here's the tricky bit, though: did you knowingly facilitate that user's illegal acts?
If your network was broken into and someone did these things without your knowledge, you certainly can't be held liable for his acts. If you ran your network responsibly, you can't even be called negeligent.
But when you open up your wireless LAN and let any and every Joe get Internet access through your network, and you deliberately make no effort to authenticate or gather sufficient information to a) track down abusers; or b) prevent abuse, one might suggest that you are acting as an accessory to whatever crimes are committed through your network.
It's possible, though, that if this is going to be treated like any other public utility, that the city is going to be OK with the fact that they'll just need to track these users down in real-time, by triangulating positions and using surveillance cameras, though.
And keep in mind that this is just the legal end of things. Generally when any customer signs a contract with a network provider, that contract includes bits about the customer not violating the ISP's terms of service, etc., etc. It isn't too far-fetched to assume that the city is subject to one or more ISPs' terms of use, and that they'll have to enforce those same terms on the general public that uses these public networks. If they are unable to reliably do so, the hosting ISP could be perfectly justified in enforcing penalties in the contract, perhaps including disconnection of service.
There's no reason to assume that just because it's a "city" doing this that they'll be exempt from having to honor an ISP's terms of service. But who knows? Maybe they're expecting to be large enough that they won't consider themselves customers of ISP's so much as peers...
One of the things that makes the Internet great is the wealth of content freely available online. Some might say that the signal-to-noise ratio is rather low, but having funds to run a web site does not automatically mean you're improving that ratio.
This freely-available content has to be paid for by somebody. Usually it's those wanting to make that content available, and unless they have some means to offset the costs of doing so, some will be unable to do it. This is why most free sites resort to advertising over paid memberships.
Yes, "free" sites need to take into account the jerks that want to rape their site without looking at the promotional content as well. This needs to be addressed when they're coming up with a pseudo-business model (keeping in mind that many sites that carry ads are not remotely commercial). But all you're really doing is increasing the bandwidth-to-advertising revenue ratio, and are having a direct impact on that site's ability to stay online.
Yes, it's an issue with their business model. But the only reason their business model is failing is because there are people blocking their ads. It doesn't matter that their ads may be well-placed, are not intrusive and not offensive, your ad blocker blocks them all.
This attitude, quite frankly, sucks.
Thank God we have enough people out there who do not block advertising, or else we wouldn't have Slashdot. Would you rather sites like Slashdot disappear (due to a "poor" business model) just because you're anti-advertising?
I would bet just the opposite. Most "script kiddies" are in fact jr. high or high school age. They have a social "elite" consisting of a few college-age kiddies that haven't let go. These are guys that would write exploits or fix broken ones and pass out to all of their kiddie friends.
However you look at it, they're all children, regardless of how old they really are. This is why we call them kiddies.
This article is fairly loaded with bias, but I'll try to make the point anyway: Use the best tool for the task.
Anyone that tells you a single operating system is the best tool for every task is an idiot. So the question becomes, which operating system is the better tool for most of your tasks?
That's entirely a question for the user: are you going to be doing a lot of Unixishy development? Is there some particular software you need to use to do your daily job? Can you afford a second computer?
I personally think it's silly to limit yourself to one OS if you can afford a second computer. Hell, I have several, most of them headless systems running Linux with a beefy Windows system that's my sole head. I use Exceed to run X apps from my Linux servers.