So, if you're a web hosting company, and you have, say, several MILLION users, you are now required, under French law, to check each and every one of them for "identification", lest you (as the hoster) be responsible for the content.
Making changes to the TOS "demanding" that users include contact info isn't enough, because if the users DON'T, then BigHostingCompany is responsible for the content. To the French, it is "your problem" if the people hosting on your server didn't put the identification, because YOU are responsible for their content.
Prediction: Mass exodus of web servers, a la Australian and p0rn sites.
Why not just create a cookie file that is NFS mounted, and allow free read/write access to it? Even better would be a plugin for browsers that says "for these domains, use this cookie file (NFS mounted) and for all others (ones you care about), use that cookie file.
Or vice versa depending on your particular cares and concerns.:)
I feel the need to point out, once again, that Yahoo doesn't WRITE the content on its news site, it comes in off "the wire" from news agencies around the world.
That might make sense, because its easy to have that happen (for example, film a six minute battle scene from five cameras... there's a half-hour of work-print footage) I could accept that as where the rumors and stuff started. Somewhere at home I have the "Making of Dune" book that came out when they made the movie (which says nothing about a "really really long version", which you would think it would do if there was such a beast). I'll have to see if they mention the work-print thing in there....
OK, this particular subject keeps coming up. There IS NO six-hour version of the movie. No, you didn't ever see it on TV, Sci-Fi channel has never show the "six hour version" and no, your friend's friend didn't REALLY see it on VHS.
There are TWO versions of the movie. The one in the theaters that ran around 2 hours, and a "longer" version (NOT a directors' cut, you'll notice Lynch's name was removed from this print at his request) that has a different intro, a formal "narrator", and while it explains things a little bit more, it's just more "kludgy".
I certainly won't claim that we had a LONG discussion on the topic, so what follows is speculation based on what we DID discuss.
I think the problem is that "stopping sales to amazon" won't change anything. It doesn't "convince" Amazon to change their ways. Amazon doesn't "need" O'Reilly (in the sense of buying their books directly from ORA). Amazon feels no pain or loss if they get the titles from ORA direct or via the distributor. (I also am not sure what percentage of the books already come from the distributors... it could be that the percentage of books that come direct from ORA is small-to-non-existent.)
Also bear in mind that a LOT of companies have software patents NOT for bullying others or for trading but merely to prevent the Amazon's of the world from patenting the "obvious" and using it against them.
It's easy to say "oh, just publish the info and its prior art", but one can easily look at one-click shopping to know that prior art didn't prevent the patent from being granted, and it doesn't prevent B&N from having to spend Donald Trump Lotto defending themselves.
If you hold the patent, you save yourself the court costs down the road.
Now, if you wanted to maintain a PABL (Patent-Abuser Black List), that's a different story altogether....
I spoke with Tim about this very topic. Unfortunately, Amazon can easily get the books from other sources (Ingram, etc.) so that's not really all that viable a solution.
What I mean when I say that is NOT to approach it like so:
Hey ya jagoff, why the hell can't I use your code with my BSD-flavor-of-choice?! Fear the Daemon, he's so much more righteous than Tux!
Perhaps I should have said "politely" rather than carefully.
I'll admit to not having followed LinuxRT from conception to present, so I don't know the origin of this code, but if he wrote it all on his own, then that code is his to license or patent however he chooses within the bounds of the law. If he wants to patent his invention and license it free of charge to GPL'ed code and tell people using the BSD license to pound sand - as much as I would disagree with him - that's his choice to make. The BSD people would probably come up with their own stuff, be more friendly in the licensing, and the world would probably follow.
1.) It doesn't matter if he EVER defends the patent. He's not (I don't think) patenting it to hold it ransom from the likes of Sun and Microsoft, but rather to prevent someone like Sun or Microsoft from patenting it themselves and trying to charge licensing fees.
2.) I think, if approached carefully, that Hurd/BSD users would probably have little difficulty getting "free use" clauses.
3.) While I understand that in some things, you have to "rush forward" to patent something, I think now is an excellent time to revisit an idea that was talked about once before, that being a "GPP" or General Public Patent... some structure that patent-holders can use as a boilerplate for releasing their patents to any and all "Free"/"Open" use.
when you download images from them, they include an HTML "TEXTAREA" which contains the entire terms and conditions (pretty standard fare).
What they NEGLECTED to do, however, is either:
(a) JavaScript it so you can't actually get focus inside the textarea to change things, or (b) verify that the license agreement "matches" what it should when you click to "Agree"
You could theoretically change the agreement to say "Space Imaging agrees to grant the downloader exclusive rights to this image in perpetuity. Any future sales of this image by Space Imaging will incur a royalty payment due the downloader in the amount of 25% of the collected monies". If they, in turn, agree to that license (by sending you the poster/image/etc.), then it should be considered legally binding.
Moral of the story: Let's paste the GPL in there, and have a field day.:)
Because it violates the RFC defining what a domain name should look like, and many pieces of software are written intelligently enough that they know "hey, that's not valid!" and reject it -- exactly as they should. D
"Big clueless industry with no will to innovate depends on closed-source security-through-obscurity to protect its service."
Answer: DVD Video
The answer here is simple: Someone possessing clue needs to reverse engineer the protocol, and open soruce an application which can "simulate" any of the "permitted" applications. (e.g., so that OpenCCVS can pretend to be CCVS, or any other credit card verification software).
You know that each individual verification application must have some "fingerprint" or signature, because an individual application has to be "permitted" to connect, so there must be some licensing or keying going on to permit that. This is analagous to the many keys that the DeCSS people discovered.
When you create the Open Source version, it is one which the clearing houses cannot prevent, because it can present the appropriate protocols as though it was coming from any of the licensed applications. What are they going to do? Kill all the existing licensees and make them retool to a new system? Forget it, they had enough problem getting credit-card swipes reconfigured to handle Y2K expirations, they ain't gonna redo the whole authentication scheme.
All this needs is someone to commit the time to doing it.
Exactly... ANYONE can be called in for the gusto, but its important to remember two things: 1.) Linux is the "hip new happening thing"... that has a certain value in the court of public opinion 2.) Linux users tend to be more willing to DO the types of things we're talking about. Sure, anyone could be called as an expert witness (and if their testimony is relevant, they SHOULD be), but the Linux community probably will be more readily available to offer up speakers than, say, the Windows community.
I saw some of this touched on, but I think there are some things we should have:
A 'demonstration' of how to copy a DVD, complete with a source DVD (The Matrix or something popular) and the appropriate hardware to copy it to a blank DVD disk, as well as a commercial DVD player and TV. Keep receipts, to show that the cost is "X dollars" where X is significantly higher than the SECOND receipt, that being for the cost of buying the DVD at Fry's. You might be able to get DVD production houses (ones that bill out their time and such) to loan the hardware, since the long-term benefit to THEM is that the price on future hardware will probably go down if the DVD industry doesn't get to charge huge tithes for the "trade secrets".
To contrast that, we have a Linux machine, which we use DeCSS (on that same movie whatever it is), to "make the DVD disc usable."
The practical upshot of which is:
You show that any "copying of DVD's" argument is bunk. No DVD player can read the unencrypted data, so the "only" way to copy DVD's is to use expensive media, expensive hardware, etc.
You put the DeCSS code in its intended environment - using an existing, purchased DVD disc, and playing it on a Linux machine.
Now, as I understand it, there is currently no means of directly streaming through the CSS-encoded data watching it in real-time. A coder I am not, but this is definitely something we should, as a community, devote some time to having ready to fly in two and a half weeks.
The psychological factor of us "simply wanting to play the DVD we just bought at the store" and showing what it was intended for can (and will) go a LONG way, I think.
Some things I think did NOT do us any favors today:
The diskettes and source code. Yes, I think they were a great idea, and a good wy of showing "the genie was out of the bottle", but I think the potential for damage was greater. (Allowing the plaintiffs to show that "we are turning into a cause, sending the DeCSS code everywhere we can") That made it easier for them to show a reason for trying to "do anything possible" to get the TRO (unsuccessfully, true, but it DID give some credence to their side).
We need more people. The gallery was only half full. Granted, we did great for 30 hours notice, but we definitely want SRO on 1/14
We should investigate what needs to be done to have Linux people called as "expert witnesses". You can be sure that the DVD folks will pull people out from all over, affidavits from various and sundry showing how evil DeCSS is. We need to be able to counter that. Prospective candidates must own a suit (rules me out *G*), be good public speakers, and be well learned on the topic at hand. --- Is ESR doing anything on 1/14?
I'm sure there are other things we should do, and I'm certain people will add them, but I think this represents a good starting point. We did great today, but this is a minor skirmish in what will probably be a moderately sized war.
Chris Dibona and myself (and hopefully others!) are planning to meet at the courthouse at 8am. Chris' page for this is at: http://www.dibona.com/social/dvd/index.shtml... Hope to see you there! D
Very simple. If you don't compile the source or patch the code yourself, you have no way of knowing what, if anything, your RPM/etc. is patched for, which specific CERT advisories, etc.
Not to sound elitist, but if you're not compiling from source, then you should contact your software vendor for information as to what the hell they've done. It is especially annoying if it is not documented (in something other than the source code) what they've patched, if they haven't changed the version number at all.
FYI, a limit is "this is the limit of what I am willing to spend this equity, buy it for me at the best price you can, up to NNN dollars", or "this is as cheap as I am willing to sell this stock for, if you can't get this for it, don't sell it". The type of order you are describing (where if it dips below N you sell as close to N as possible) is a "Stop" order. You are trying to stop your losses.
Seems you need a lesson in stocks. Just because the stock is at $200, doesn't mean Red Hat has free access to all those dollars.
Seems like you could ALSO use a lesson in stocks. If you think that VA sold every share you're very mistaken. Most companies (admittedly I haven't confirmed this from VA's SEC filings but I'm sure someone else more knowledgeable can confirm this) retain a reserve of their stock as a war-chest of sorts.
IPO'ing companies make money in two ways. They make some immediate money (at a lower price) from the direct sale of the stock @ IPO price. In this case, VA made $30.00/share.
They also "make" money in that they retain shares of stock which (after IPO) have an increased value. That value is useful for Secondary Public Offerings (if needed) but more often for acquisitions. (e.g., we're buying your public company, and we're going to do it by swapping your stock with our own at some determined ratio). The higher the value of the company's own stock, the lower that ratio is.
Is this case, VA could, right now while the fire is hot, acquire companies using stock swaps. (There are probably SEC requirements that they wait a certain time post-IPO, but that's the gist of it).
For classic examples of this, note that Yahoo has almost never (I don't want to say never, but I can't recall any time they did it) paid cash for a company. They simply dip into their stock reserves and use that to acquire companies. VA could do the same thing.
1.) Many countries (such as the Cayman Islands) will offer you residency if you purchase property in the Islands. If you've got enough money to hide in the Caymans this isn't a problem. From that point you're a Citizen of THERE, and not of the US and no longer bound by silly IRS codes.
2.) Offshore banking makes it hard for the IRS to prove income. Transactions greater than $10,000 to/from a US bank get reported directly to the IRS. That's not the case in the "money havens", since they are not bound by US law. You could transfer monies to and from your brokerage account (in another country, England maybe? Who knows?) where you could make capital gains on investments, but the IRS has no way of obtaining the information.
VISA is international, there are god knows how many weird or even contradicting laws, hence its not only ridiculous, its impossible for them to filter transactions.
So if Citibank is International (it is), they are no longer required to know and obey the banking laws in the places they do business?
That is the "price" of being a large international company -- you have a team of lawyers, in-house and on-retainer, whose job it is to know the various laws that affect the way you do business in the many places.
Now, what happened is that credit cards companies have to differentiate between "purchases" (for goods and services) and "cash advances" (for anything else). The rules between the two are widely different in the way the card companies are allowed to behave.
In many states, such as California, you may not use a credit card for gambling purposes.
Now, some will say "she did a cash advance", but that's not what happened. A cash advance is like going to an ATM machine, you surrender your card, someone draws cash against your card and hands it back to you. (In fact, the most common place for credit card cash advances IS the ATM machine, with local banks being a close second). Most credit card authorization agreements strictly forbid the merchant from performing cash advances (hence you can use your ATM card to do "$20 over" at the grocery store and get change, but they won't let you do that with your Visa card because that would be a cash advance).
Her contention appears to be: This wasn't a cash advance, because no cash entered my hands, and it couldn't have been a charge, because credit card charges for gambling are illegal in California.
Is the law dumb? Yes. You should be able to spend your money or ruin your credit rating on whatever you want to. This is still (supposedly) a free country.
Did Visa violate the law? Absolutely, as is MasterCard probably. Most of them don't bother to do the kind of fine-tuning they need to on their card acceptance routines.
Now, if she had WON, the casino could have turned the tables and said "You fraudulently used a credit card to obtain funds" and reneged (legally) on paying her winnings.
ObDisclaimer: I am not a lawyer
Check Your Ignorance At The Door
on
One for the Kids
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· Score: 0
Heading off-topic, but... The only evidence of any full-auto weapons at Waco was the weapons in use by the Federales. All video tapes and accounts released which show fire from INSIDE all show the same thing - single shots at a time. No evidence of grenades was found. There were wild reports of both, but none of the physical evidence supported those claims. There were Hellfire attachments for some semi-auto rifles, which are perfectly legal and the weapon is still semi-automatic. (It generates the illusion of automatic fire by cycling the trigger rapidly). There was no evidence of THEIR use by the Branch Davidians at any time during the siege. (Which makes sense because they are fun to use but not very accurate).
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Making changes to the TOS "demanding" that users include contact info isn't enough, because if the users DON'T, then BigHostingCompany is responsible for the content. To the French, it is "your problem" if the people hosting on your server didn't put the identification, because YOU are responsible for their content.
Prediction: Mass exodus of web servers, a la Australian and p0rn sites.
Or vice versa depending on your particular cares and concerns. :)
I feel the need to point out, once again, that Yahoo doesn't WRITE the content on its news site, it comes in off "the wire" from news agencies around the world.
That might make sense, because its easy to have that happen (for example, film a six minute battle scene from five cameras... there's a half-hour of work-print footage) I could accept that as where the rumors and stuff started. Somewhere at home I have the "Making of Dune" book that came out when they made the movie (which says nothing about a "really really long version", which you would think it would do if there was such a beast). I'll have to see if they mention the work-print thing in there....
There are TWO versions of the movie. The one in the theaters that ran around 2 hours, and a "longer" version (NOT a directors' cut, you'll notice Lynch's name was removed from this print at his request) that has a different intro, a formal "narrator", and while it explains things a little bit more, it's just more "kludgy".
The "Six Hour Dune Movie" is an urban legend.
D
I think the problem is that "stopping sales to amazon" won't change anything. It doesn't "convince" Amazon to change their ways. Amazon doesn't "need" O'Reilly (in the sense of buying their books directly from ORA). Amazon feels no pain or loss if they get the titles from ORA direct or via the distributor. (I also am not sure what percentage of the books already come from the distributors... it could be that the percentage of books that come direct from ORA is small-to-non-existent.)
It's easy to say "oh, just publish the info and its prior art", but one can easily look at one-click shopping to know that prior art didn't prevent the patent from being granted, and it doesn't prevent B&N from having to spend Donald Trump Lotto defending themselves.
If you hold the patent, you save yourself the court costs down the road.
Now, if you wanted to maintain a PABL (Patent-Abuser Black List), that's a different story altogether....
Wish that it was, though. :)
Hey ya jagoff, why the hell can't I use your code with my BSD-flavor-of-choice?! Fear the Daemon, he's so much more righteous than Tux!
Perhaps I should have said "politely" rather than carefully.
I'll admit to not having followed LinuxRT from conception to present, so I don't know the origin of this code, but if he wrote it all on his own, then that code is his to license or patent however he chooses within the bounds of the law. If he wants to patent his invention and license it free of charge to GPL'ed code and tell people using the BSD license to pound sand - as much as I would disagree with him - that's his choice to make. The BSD people would probably come up with their own stuff, be more friendly in the licensing, and the world would probably follow.
D
2.) I think, if approached carefully, that Hurd/BSD users would probably have little difficulty getting "free use" clauses.
3.) While I understand that in some things, you have to "rush forward" to patent something, I think now is an excellent time to revisit an idea that was talked about once before, that being a "GPP" or General Public Patent... some structure that patent-holders can use as a boilerplate for releasing their patents to any and all "Free"/"Open" use.
... because booting off a floppy and mounting the hard drive is SO difficult.
Security through obscurity. Physical access trumps every security consideration except encryption. Never forget that.
What they NEGLECTED to do, however, is either:
(a) JavaScript it so you can't actually get focus inside the textarea to change things, or
(b) verify that the license agreement "matches" what it should when you click to "Agree"
You could theoretically change the agreement to say "Space Imaging agrees to grant the downloader exclusive rights to this image in perpetuity. Any future sales of this image by Space Imaging will incur a royalty payment due the downloader in the amount of 25% of the collected monies". If they, in turn, agree to that license (by sending you the poster/image/etc.), then it should be considered legally binding.
Moral of the story: Let's paste the GPL in there, and have a field day. :)
Because it violates the RFC defining what a domain name should look like, and many pieces of software are written intelligently enough that they know "hey, that's not valid!" and reject it -- exactly as they should. D
"Big clueless industry with no will to innovate depends on closed-source security-through-obscurity to protect its service."
Answer: DVD Video
The answer here is simple: Someone possessing clue needs to reverse engineer the protocol, and open soruce an application which can "simulate" any of the "permitted" applications. (e.g., so that OpenCCVS can pretend to be CCVS, or any other credit card verification software).
You know that each individual verification application must have some "fingerprint" or signature, because an individual application has to be "permitted" to connect, so there must be some licensing or keying going on to permit that. This is analagous to the many keys that the DeCSS people discovered.
When you create the Open Source version, it is one which the clearing houses cannot prevent, because it can present the appropriate protocols as though it was coming from any of the licensed applications. What are they going to do? Kill all the existing licensees and make them retool to a new system? Forget it, they had enough problem getting credit-card swipes reconfigured to handle Y2K expirations, they ain't gonna redo the whole authentication scheme.
All this needs is someone to commit the time to doing it.
D
Exactly... ANYONE can be called in for the gusto, but its important to remember two things:
1.) Linux is the "hip new happening thing"... that has a certain value in the court of public opinion
2.) Linux users tend to be more willing to DO the types of things we're talking about. Sure, anyone could be called as an expert witness (and if their testimony is relevant, they SHOULD be), but the Linux community probably will be more readily available to offer up speakers than, say, the Windows community.
A 'demonstration' of how to copy a DVD, complete with a source DVD (The Matrix or something popular) and the appropriate hardware to copy it to a blank DVD disk, as well as a commercial DVD player and TV. Keep receipts, to show that the cost is "X dollars" where X is significantly higher than the SECOND receipt, that being for the cost of buying the DVD at Fry's. You might be able to get DVD production houses (ones that bill out their time and such) to loan the hardware, since the long-term benefit to THEM is that the price on future hardware will probably go down if the DVD industry doesn't get to charge huge tithes for the "trade secrets".
To contrast that, we have a Linux machine, which we use DeCSS (on that same movie whatever it is), to "make the DVD disc usable."
The practical upshot of which is:
Now, as I understand it, there is currently no means of directly streaming through the CSS-encoded data watching it in real-time. A coder I am not, but this is definitely something we should, as a community, devote some time to having ready to fly in two and a half weeks.
The psychological factor of us "simply wanting to play the DVD we just bought at the store" and showing what it was intended for can (and will) go a LONG way, I think.
Some things I think did NOT do us any favors today:
I'm sure there are other things we should do, and I'm certain people will add them, but I think this represents a good starting point. We did great today, but this is a minor skirmish in what will probably be a moderately sized war.
Chris Dibona and myself (and hopefully others!) are planning to meet at the courthouse at 8am. Chris' page for this is at: http://www.dibona.com/social/dvd/index.shtml ... Hope to see you there! D
Not to sound elitist, but if you're not compiling from source, then you should contact your software vendor for information as to what the hell they've done. It is especially annoying if it is not documented (in something other than the source code) what they've patched, if they haven't changed the version number at all.
FYI, a limit is "this is the limit of what I am willing to spend this equity, buy it for me at the best price you can, up to NNN dollars", or "this is as cheap as I am willing to sell this stock for, if you can't get this for it, don't sell it". The type of order you are describing (where if it dips below N you sell as close to N as possible) is a "Stop" order. You are trying to stop your losses.
Seems like you could ALSO use a lesson in stocks. If you think that VA sold every share you're very mistaken. Most companies (admittedly I haven't confirmed this from VA's SEC filings but I'm sure someone else more knowledgeable can confirm this) retain a reserve of their stock as a war-chest of sorts.
IPO'ing companies make money in two ways. They make some immediate money (at a lower price) from the direct sale of the stock @ IPO price. In this case, VA made $30.00/share.
They also "make" money in that they retain shares of stock which (after IPO) have an increased value. That value is useful for Secondary Public Offerings (if needed) but more often for acquisitions. (e.g., we're buying your public company, and we're going to do it by swapping your stock with our own at some determined ratio). The higher the value of the company's own stock, the lower that ratio is.
Is this case, VA could, right now while the fire is hot, acquire companies using stock swaps. (There are probably SEC requirements that they wait a certain time post-IPO, but that's the gist of it).
For classic examples of this, note that Yahoo has almost never (I don't want to say never, but I can't recall any time they did it) paid cash for a company. They simply dip into their stock reserves and use that to acquire companies. VA could do the same thing.
D
So,... do you want to invalidate a candidate? Give him an award and send him $20.00. poof! he's ineligible.
Ineligibility on having received this particular award, I can understand. Ineligibility because you've received OTHER awards is dumb.
Those who would exchange liberty for security deserve neither.
OK, I know I fucked that quote up, but the sentiment is still there.
1.) Many countries (such as the Cayman Islands) will offer you residency if you purchase property in the Islands. If you've got enough money to hide in the Caymans this isn't a problem. From that point you're a Citizen of THERE, and not of the US and no longer bound by silly IRS codes.
2.) Offshore banking makes it hard for the IRS to prove income. Transactions greater than $10,000 to/from a US bank get reported directly to the IRS. That's not the case in the "money havens", since they are not bound by US law. You could transfer monies to and from your brokerage account (in another country, England maybe? Who knows?) where you could make capital gains on investments, but the IRS has no way of obtaining the information.
Hope this helps clear up the confusion.
So if Citibank is International (it is), they are no longer required to know and obey the banking laws in the places they do business?
That is the "price" of being a large international company -- you have a team of lawyers, in-house and on-retainer, whose job it is to know the various laws that affect the way you do business in the many places.
Now, what happened is that credit cards companies have to differentiate between "purchases" (for goods and services) and "cash advances" (for anything else). The rules between the two are widely different in the way the card companies are allowed to behave.
In many states, such as California, you may not use a credit card for gambling purposes.
Now, some will say "she did a cash advance", but that's not what happened. A cash advance is like going to an ATM machine, you surrender your card, someone draws cash against your card and hands it back to you. (In fact, the most common place for credit card cash advances IS the ATM machine, with local banks being a close second). Most credit card authorization agreements strictly forbid the merchant from performing cash advances (hence you can use your ATM card to do "$20 over" at the grocery store and get change, but they won't let you do that with your Visa card because that would be a cash advance).
Her contention appears to be: This wasn't a cash advance, because no cash entered my hands, and it couldn't have been a charge, because credit card charges for gambling are illegal in California.
Is the law dumb? Yes. You should be able to spend your money or ruin your credit rating on whatever you want to. This is still (supposedly) a free country.
Did Visa violate the law? Absolutely, as is MasterCard probably. Most of them don't bother to do the kind of fine-tuning they need to on their card acceptance routines.
Now, if she had WON, the casino could have turned the tables and said "You fraudulently used a credit card to obtain funds" and reneged (legally) on paying her winnings.
ObDisclaimer: I am not a lawyer
Heading off-topic, but... The only evidence of any full-auto weapons at Waco was the weapons in use by the Federales. All video tapes and accounts released which show fire from INSIDE all show the same thing - single shots at a time. No evidence of grenades was found. There were wild reports of both, but none of the physical evidence supported those claims. There were Hellfire attachments for some semi-auto rifles, which are perfectly legal and the weapon is still semi-automatic. (It generates the illusion of automatic fire by cycling the trigger rapidly). There was no evidence of THEIR use by the Branch Davidians at any time during the siege. (Which makes sense because they are fun to use but not very accurate).