3rd party, un-authorized censorship of your Internet connection cost you money, and inconvenience. Although it'd be hard to prove, that's grounds for a lawsuit.
Perhaps, if it was done by MAPS directly to your connection, however it was not - MAPS posted an opinion that others acted upon. MAPS' actions would only be actionable in negligence, and there is no way a negligence case against MAPS would be successful in recovering a loss of money or time. Now if you could prove that either your equipment was physically damaged, or you were physically injured, and that it was foreseeable (doubtful), you might have a chance of getting somewhere.
IANALY,TINLA
This is far worse than closed source
on
Shared Source?
·
· Score: 1
They're licensing the code free of charge to "top tier ISVs". You can bet any money they're talking about large, closed source shops. Not only is this discriminatory against free software shops, and, of equal importance, is discriminatory against smaller closed source shops.
Even if they allowed the smaller shops to get access with a fee, they're the very ones least able to afford the fees.
The fact of the matter is, their concept as described is highly anti-competitive - it adds an unmittigable barrier to entry for both the ISVs too small to qualify and for open source developers.
Trust Microsoft to come up with a way to release source code in a way that is strategically designed to hurt the concept of open source.
Some choice quotes: "your people will all be less talented than me. I don't want to have to spend all my time teaching them" (he never met the team).
This goes a little further than being a prima donna - this is just outright blinkered thinking. Somebody like that is never going to be effective in a commercial context, because some flexibility will be required. The only way they're going to be effective is working on their own on stuff they have decided is important (which doesn't happen in commercial environments).
It is possible to hire teams of brilliant developers. I do this, and I think it's a major selling point in attracting other brilliant developers (ie. We know you're brilliant, but everybody else is brilliant here too. You probably haven't been learning much from other people where you've been, but come to us and you'll learn as much from everybody else as they learn from you). I also keep developers much longer than the industry averages.
Firstly, bear in mind that this bill as it stands is actually an opt-out bill. It was a pre-emptive opt-out bill, but it got gutted at the last minute in the Commerce committee. This bill in fact no longer has support from any privacy or anti-spam group.
Now, regarding the international part of your question, this bill won't help you recover from American spammers. It is specifically limited in the language of the bill to spam sent to computers in the United States.
If this language were not present, then you could take action in a court in the spammer's juristiction.
I have been insulted, sworn at, i have had my intellect questioned, and heard every possible form of invective that doesn't involve my mom.
There is a standard reply to the assault on intelligence by a tech support user - "You're calling me because you couldn't do this - if I'm stupid, where does that leave you?".
how was this woman supposed to know not to delete dll's? Did the various manuals which came with her computer say, anywhere in them, not to delete dll's? I bet not!
I don't think theres anything in a persons daily life that works correctly without you having knowledge of how to use it.
To a point, yes. But I believe the level of knowledge you are demanding is too high--not only in computers, but also in your car analogy. ...
And the test for the license covers day-to-day safe and legal operation of a car, and not maintenance of that car. ...
[The] fact [that maintenance is needed] is spelled out clearly in the owner's manual... The knowledge cannot be assumed.
True, but the manual for a car doesn't spell out "Don't pull random parts out of the engine just because you don't know what they're for." I'm pretty certain that voids your warranty on the car, and there's no reason it shouldn't void free tech support for a computer either. Repairing such a diversion from responsible use ought to be a full time and materials fee for service activity.
Reasonable people know not to interfere with things in their daily lives that they don't understand, but suddenly when it comes to computers we're expected to forgive them for screwing around with things in irresponsible ways? I don't think so.
Incidentally, I've had one customer install things in ways deliberately contrary to the installation guide. After several weeks and numerous calls (including telephone, email and tracking system entries), they were still trying to futz around doing things that were in breach of that section, trying to do things that I suppose could, in bizzaro world, be thought of on a certain level as satisfying the request. They plainly knew they weren't satisfying my literal instructions, but instead of doing exactly what I said, getting it working and then seeing what they could get away with by increments, they were trying to see if they could take minor increments from their existing (and blatantly incorrect as pointed out to them)position, then telling me they'd done what I asked and saying the problem was still there.
Hello?...Boss, what? Our customers got BSOD?! Oh GREAT! No...sorry....I mean, it's not a bug.......wait a minute, my ear hurt....ya know...Any number of problems, from severity 5 to severity 1 all trigger BSOD......you don't understand?....well, I mean it's probably caused by something else, not ours!!
If you're producing an application, a BSOD is never your bug. BSODs are caused by driver errors (or in rare cases serious hardware errors). A application can never be the real cause of a BSOD, although customers often like to blame the app.
If you are for the [challenger], then you believe that exact specificity is more important than intent. And you inadvertantly empower the legal profession to profit from being better able to specify rules, etc. Which, in turn, gives those with money even more power. They can write the rules by which your interaction with them will be governed. You can be certain that the rules will be written to the advantage of the guy with the money.
Actually, this result wouldn't necessarily benefit the challenger. A lawyer with any technical ability would identify the directory itself as one of the files necessary to complete the decompression in this case - you certainly couldn't complete the decompression without it, and in every file system I've ever seen (except perhaps MSDOS 1.0 or Apple DOS 3.3), a directory was in fact just a special type of file.
Same thing if it was wrapped in a tar file - the tar file would be a necessary file to complete the decompression.
The challenge was not won - neither by "exact specificity" nor by "intent."
On the other hand, the challenge as specified appears to be a private lottery, which is illegal in most jurisdictions that matter here anyway.
SMTP servers MUST continue to accept source route syntax as specified in the main body of this document and in RFC 1123
This would seem to be a site-by-site policy issue, and as such not one that the RFC should be requiring. It's also one that will get some pretty quick listings on blackhole lists - in the real world, SMTP servers should fail (5xx) any attempt at source routed addresses.
In this case, I can. As another post said, transmitting mail and storing mail _should_ be two different things. If the mail is stored in a "fancy" mailbox, as opposed to a unix mbox (where From is the divider), then there should be no need whatsoever for the > character...but its there anyways, because Sendmail attaches it to it as it forwards it.
Only if you dont know how to configure sendmail. It only does this if the mailer definition line in sendmail.cf (the line beginning with "M") contains the "E" flag.
From the Sendmail Installation and Operation guide (aka ops.ps), version 8.103, p08-38:
EEscape lines beginning with "From" in the message with a '>' sign.
Right in the abstract, the author lays down his bias: "Unsolicited Electronic Mail, also called 'spam'". Not all unsolicited electronic mail is spam! To make a simplistic example, If someone from way back in your past (like high school) sends you an email from out of the blue, it's unsolicited (you didn't ask for it) but it's hardly spam.
Not true - in fact in the article itself he goes into some discussion of what exactly constitute spam, and basically says it's "Unsolicited Bulk Email." The analysis on this is quite thorough.
For those that haven't read the article, it is basically a run-down of the state of play to date from a formalised legal perspective, coupled with a conjecture that neither technical nor legal mechanisms (including future legislation) are capable of dealing with the problem.
The issue is likely to be considered and expanded upon considerably in legal publications worldwide in the coming year - this article will serve as a very strong point of reference for the legal profession, both helping them to understand the issues and helping them to identify other resources (the article is extensively footnoted - in fact some pages are 80% footnotes).
This article is actually more important for the future developments it enables, rather than for saying something new in itself.
It's not a precedent. Only cases that give reasons for the judgement can be precedents, and none were given here, and only the reasons become precedents, not the judgement itself or the amount.
While this is important in terms of the field, as far as day to day life goes, it is not very important. After all, we have billions and billions of years before the wrap party.
Actually, this sort of research is extremely important - understanding this stuff is key to finding a way to go faster than the speed of light (taking as a given that the narrow view of Einstinian relativity is not valid and that FTL travel is not impossible)
I want to know if we have neighbors, and if we have to worry about them
If FTL travel is impossible, you don't have to worry about them. If it's possible, you still don't have to worry about them since if they could have done anything, and would have done anything, it would already have happened.
Scary stuff. I'm a developer who was considering moving to Australia soon. This is enough to make sure that I don't move there until they stop passing Draconian laws.
Best be careful where you point the finger - after all, the US just elected a Bush to the whitehouse - America's likely to have its own draconian laws to worry about in no time flat.
Complaining about spam requires forwarding the entire message with complete headers. I haven't had a chance to read the bill yet - it was introduced and went through the committees in 1999 - but it looks like this bill may make spam complaints illegal.
What I'd like to know is, what were EFA doing at the time? The bill was titled "Copyright Ammendment (Digital Agenda) Bill 1999", yet EFA is not listed in the submissions to the committee inquiry. A bill like that screams out as being right down EFA's alley, and this interaction, which seems obscure to most people, would be blindingly obvious to EFA. It looks like they seriously dropped the ball as far as keeping in touch with what the Parliament was doing here.
Does anybody have the ICBM address of VeriSign handy? These turkeys need to be wiped off the map. A company with such a horrendous record on privacy shouldn't have even temporary control of the.com registry, let alone guaranteed permanent control, removing the last vestiges of accountability from their operations.
Frankly, VeriSign's behaviour merits complete and permanent removal from this role, not complete trust - they are, without any doubt in my mind, the most untrustworthy organisation on the net.
Of course ICANN seems little better - they don't allow anonymous feedback - you have to provide them a valid email address just to post to their forum. This in itself is no doubt an effort to discourage unfavourable opinions by people who are concerned about retribution from the ICANN/VeriSign cartel.
Don't blame him, he has no real choice in this matter. Trademarks have to be protected, no matter how little you care, or else they will become invalid and anyone can use them. If he doesn't go after OpenSSH, tomorrow it'll be Microsoft using the name.
There's more to it than that. Firstly, he's claiming "Secure Shell" as a trademark. This is unlikely to fly, as it is merely descriptive of the functionality provided, and thus not capable of being trademarked.
Regarding OpenSSH - how long has that project been running? He's left it alone this long, so he's already failed to protect the name.
In any case, they have used SSH to refer to the protocol, which has always had that name (just look in/etc/services):
ssh 22/tcp # Secure Shell Protocol
The original use of the same contraction for the product name and the protocol is a fatal flaw. There is probably no way that anybody can stop them using the name of the protocol in their product name if that name is also merely descriptive.
If he didn't sign a legal agreement stating he wouldn't discuss the company after his termination, he has the legal right to talk about the company as long as he doesn't slander them.
Legal rights are much different from ethical considerations - a company that doesn't require such agreements is trying to do the right thing by its employees, current and former. They generally don't plan to pro-actively slag off former employees (although they may give a bad reference if asked the direct question), and it's not ethically right for disgruntled employees to slag off the company they worked for previously just because the company wasn't a big enough bully to get a "don't talk" agreement.
Where legal considerations do enter into this is with listed companies. There are scary laws around this, and if the SEC decides you are either disclosing inside information improperly, or you are trying to manipulate the stock price to your own ends (even if that end is self satisfaction) using inside information or by telling fibs, there is this possibility of both civil and criminal charges.
It's been this way for a long time, and probably will continue to be this way in the future. No one likes to have someone younger than you show they're more knowledgable than you.
I don't think the original question is necessarily about knowledge, but more about skills. That said "all" is a 100% inclusive term, and I can offer a counter-example - I like it when my young coders demonstrate superior knowledge. It is my hope that they will all some day exceed my skills.
On the other hand, there are also those who think they know better. Some of these will come and ask for feedback on their approach to something, and even after being told where their approach is defective will go and take that approach anyway, and surprise, surprise, along come some defects. This is not, however, confined to the young.
If people knock back an idea, get them to explain why. Sometimes they won't be able to do this effectively, because with experience people often get a good gut feel for whether an idea is good before they can explain all the consequences. Sometimes they will be able to explain in great detail why an idea is bad, and if they can, you will most likely get a great deal of benefit from their experience.
Finally, there are people in the industry who are highly skilled and 20 years old, and people who have no skills to speak of and are 50 years old. Age is no guarantee of skill level in either direction, but somebody with a higher skill at 20 will still continue to learn and improve over time, and will have a higher skill later on in life.
Woah. When you registered, was there an agreement that you didn't bother to click? Even if not, them emailing you (provided it's rare and is related to the product) is reasonable and legitimate.
On what grounds? I've seen lots of people say this, but never seen anybody explain how when somebody pays $x for a product or service, which is the full extent of the transaction they are aware of at the time, that magically translates into "$x + permission to spam me".
Either they have permission or they don't. There is no such thing as implied permission. Such a concept reads the same way as somebody suggesting that accepting a date is equivalent to agreeing to sex. Agreement implied by hidden conditions is no agreement at all.
How about copyrighting your personal data, and at the bottom of each form you fill out put the line.
All personal data (C) 2001 All Rights Reserved...
Sorry, copyright only applies to expression, not to raw data, concepts or ideas. The copyright notice is meaningless unless you write a copyrightable item, and change your name to the contents of that item - say, a poem, a graphic symbol (perhaps that's why that one's been used), or a novel.
Canada's privacy commissioner is simply another position established so that the Liberal government has a job to grant to party supporters who no longer want to act as representatives. The position is a farce and carries absolutely no real duties or responsibilities.
Actually, Canada's privacy commissioner does an extremely valuable job. The role involves being an advocate for the consumer, and developing fundamental privacy positions for the consumer. The commissioner advocates consumer privacy rights to corporations, trade groups, and to the government, and is frequently quoted internationally. The commissioner doesn't need to be elected, so the bribery concerns that surround elected officials aren't present, and as such the commissioner can be more effectively trusted not to be under undue influence from those with deep pockets who would seek to erode privacy.
Such a role is extremely valuable in modern democracies, where the choice at election time is frequently between two candidates who are in the pockets of the same corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps, if it was done by MAPS directly to your connection, however it was not - MAPS posted an opinion that others acted upon. MAPS' actions would only be actionable in negligence, and there is no way a negligence case against MAPS would be successful in recovering a loss of money or time. Now if you could prove that either your equipment was physically damaged, or you were physically injured, and that it was foreseeable (doubtful), you might have a chance of getting somewhere.
IANALY,TINLA
Even if they allowed the smaller shops to get access with a fee, they're the very ones least able to afford the fees.
The fact of the matter is, their concept as described is highly anti-competitive - it adds an unmittigable barrier to entry for both the ISVs too small to qualify and for open source developers.
Trust Microsoft to come up with a way to release source code in a way that is strategically designed to hurt the concept of open source.
This goes a little further than being a prima donna - this is just outright blinkered thinking. Somebody like that is never going to be effective in a commercial context, because some flexibility will be required. The only way they're going to be effective is working on their own on stuff they have decided is important (which doesn't happen in commercial environments).
It is possible to hire teams of brilliant developers. I do this, and I think it's a major selling point in attracting other brilliant developers (ie. We know you're brilliant, but everybody else is brilliant here too. You probably haven't been learning much from other people where you've been, but come to us and you'll learn as much from everybody else as they learn from you). I also keep developers much longer than the industry averages.
Now this is libelous - open and shut. You should file suit, then submit a /. story and ask for donations to your legal fund.
Now, regarding the international part of your question, this bill won't help you recover from American spammers. It is specifically limited in the language of the bill to spam sent to computers in the United States.
If this language were not present, then you could take action in a court in the spammer's juristiction.
There is a standard reply to the assault on intelligence by a tech support user - "You're calling me because you couldn't do this - if I'm stupid, where does that leave you?".
And the test for the license covers day-to-day safe and legal operation of a car, and not maintenance of that car.
[The] fact [that maintenance is needed] is spelled out clearly in the owner's manual... The knowledge cannot be assumed.
True, but the manual for a car doesn't spell out "Don't pull random parts out of the engine just because you don't know what they're for." I'm pretty certain that voids your warranty on the car, and there's no reason it shouldn't void free tech support for a computer either. Repairing such a diversion from responsible use ought to be a full time and materials fee for service activity.
Reasonable people know not to interfere with things in their daily lives that they don't understand, but suddenly when it comes to computers we're expected to forgive them for screwing around with things in irresponsible ways? I don't think so.
Incidentally, I've had one customer install things in ways deliberately contrary to the installation guide. After several weeks and numerous calls (including telephone, email and tracking system entries), they were still trying to futz around doing things that were in breach of that section, trying to do things that I suppose could, in bizzaro world, be thought of on a certain level as satisfying the request. They plainly knew they weren't satisfying my literal instructions, but instead of doing exactly what I said, getting it working and then seeing what they could get away with by increments, they were trying to see if they could take minor increments from their existing (and blatantly incorrect as pointed out to them)position, then telling me they'd done what I asked and saying the problem was still there.
Naturally, the customers blamed the product.
If you're producing an application, a BSOD is never your bug. BSODs are caused by driver errors (or in rare cases serious hardware errors). A application can never be the real cause of a BSOD, although customers often like to blame the app.
Actually, this result wouldn't necessarily benefit the challenger. A lawyer with any technical ability would identify the directory itself as one of the files necessary to complete the decompression in this case - you certainly couldn't complete the decompression without it, and in every file system I've ever seen (except perhaps MSDOS 1.0 or Apple DOS 3.3), a directory was in fact just a special type of file.
Same thing if it was wrapped in a tar file - the tar file would be a necessary file to complete the decompression.
The challenge was not won - neither by "exact specificity" nor by "intent."
On the other hand, the challenge as specified appears to be a private lottery, which is illegal in most jurisdictions that matter here anyway.
This would seem to be a site-by-site policy issue, and as such not one that the RFC should be requiring. It's also one that will get some pretty quick listings on blackhole lists - in the real world, SMTP servers should fail (5xx) any attempt at source routed addresses.
Only if you dont know how to configure sendmail. It only does this if the mailer definition line in sendmail.cf (the line beginning with "M") contains the "E" flag.
From the Sendmail Installation and Operation guide (aka ops.ps), version 8.103, p08-38:
E Escape lines beginning with "From" in the message with a '>' sign.
Not true - in fact in the article itself he goes into some discussion of what exactly constitute spam, and basically says it's "Unsolicited Bulk Email." The analysis on this is quite thorough.
For those that haven't read the article, it is basically a run-down of the state of play to date from a formalised legal perspective, coupled with a conjecture that neither technical nor legal mechanisms (including future legislation) are capable of dealing with the problem.
The issue is likely to be considered and expanded upon considerably in legal publications worldwide in the coming year - this article will serve as a very strong point of reference for the legal profession, both helping them to understand the issues and helping them to identify other resources (the article is extensively footnoted - in fact some pages are 80% footnotes).
This article is actually more important for the future developments it enables, rather than for saying something new in itself.
Both eBay's and Kosmo's actions were likely actionable without the need for the Californian law in any case.
Whether it's worthwhile for an individual to take action on that is questionable though.
It's not a precedent. Only cases that give reasons for the judgement can be precedents, and none were given here, and only the reasons become precedents, not the judgement itself or the amount.
While this is important in terms of the field, as far as day to day life goes, it is not very important. After all, we have billions and billions of years before the wrap party.
Actually, this sort of research is extremely important - understanding this stuff is key to finding a way to go faster than the speed of light (taking as a given that the narrow view of Einstinian relativity is not valid and that FTL travel is not impossible)
I want to know if we have neighbors, and if we have to worry about them
If FTL travel is impossible, you don't have to worry about them. If it's possible, you still don't have to worry about them since if they could have done anything, and would have done anything, it would already have happened.
Scary stuff. I'm a developer who was considering moving to Australia soon. This is enough to make sure that I don't move there until they stop passing Draconian laws.
Best be careful where you point the finger - after all, the US just elected a Bush to the whitehouse - America's likely to have its own draconian laws to worry about in no time flat.
Complaining about spam requires forwarding the entire message with complete headers. I haven't had a chance to read the bill yet - it was introduced and went through the committees in 1999 - but it looks like this bill may make spam complaints illegal.
What I'd like to know is, what were EFA doing at the time? The bill was titled "Copyright Ammendment (Digital Agenda) Bill 1999", yet EFA is not listed in the submissions to the committee inquiry. A bill like that screams out as being right down EFA's alley, and this interaction, which seems obscure to most people, would be blindingly obvious to EFA. It looks like they seriously dropped the ball as far as keeping in touch with what the Parliament was doing here.
Does anybody have the ICBM address of VeriSign handy? These turkeys need to be wiped off the map. A company with such a horrendous record on privacy shouldn't have even temporary control of the .com registry, let alone guaranteed permanent control, removing the last vestiges of accountability from their operations.
Frankly, VeriSign's behaviour merits complete and permanent removal from this role, not complete trust - they are, without any doubt in my mind, the most untrustworthy organisation on the net.
Of course ICANN seems little better - they don't allow anonymous feedback - you have to provide them a valid email address just to post to their forum. This in itself is no doubt an effort to discourage unfavourable opinions by people who are concerned about retribution from the ICANN/VeriSign cartel.
There's more to it than that. Firstly, he's claiming "Secure Shell" as a trademark. This is unlikely to fly, as it is merely descriptive of the functionality provided, and thus not capable of being trademarked.
Regarding OpenSSH - how long has that project been running? He's left it alone this long, so he's already failed to protect the name.
In any case, they have used SSH to refer to the protocol, which has always had that name (just look in /etc/services):
ssh 22/tcp # Secure Shell Protocol
The original use of the same contraction for the product name and the protocol is a fatal flaw. There is probably no way that anybody can stop them using the name of the protocol in their product name if that name is also merely descriptive.
So that's where Superman's polar home ended up when it crashed into the ocean.
Legal rights are much different from ethical considerations - a company that doesn't require such agreements is trying to do the right thing by its employees, current and former. They generally don't plan to pro-actively slag off former employees (although they may give a bad reference if asked the direct question), and it's not ethically right for disgruntled employees to slag off the company they worked for previously just because the company wasn't a big enough bully to get a "don't talk" agreement.
Where legal considerations do enter into this is with listed companies. There are scary laws around this, and if the SEC decides you are either disclosing inside information improperly, or you are trying to manipulate the stock price to your own ends (even if that end is self satisfaction) using inside information or by telling fibs, there is this possibility of both civil and criminal charges.
I don't think the original question is necessarily about knowledge, but more about skills. That said "all" is a 100% inclusive term, and I can offer a counter-example - I like it when my young coders demonstrate superior knowledge. It is my hope that they will all some day exceed my skills.
On the other hand, there are also those who think they know better. Some of these will come and ask for feedback on their approach to something, and even after being told where their approach is defective will go and take that approach anyway, and surprise, surprise, along come some defects. This is not, however, confined to the young.
If people knock back an idea, get them to explain why. Sometimes they won't be able to do this effectively, because with experience people often get a good gut feel for whether an idea is good before they can explain all the consequences. Sometimes they will be able to explain in great detail why an idea is bad, and if they can, you will most likely get a great deal of benefit from their experience.
Finally, there are people in the industry who are highly skilled and 20 years old, and people who have no skills to speak of and are 50 years old. Age is no guarantee of skill level in either direction, but somebody with a higher skill at 20 will still continue to learn and improve over time, and will have a higher skill later on in life.
On what grounds? I've seen lots of people say this, but never seen anybody explain how when somebody pays $x for a product or service, which is the full extent of the transaction they are aware of at the time, that magically translates into "$x + permission to spam me".
Either they have permission or they don't. There is no such thing as implied permission. Such a concept reads the same way as somebody suggesting that accepting a date is equivalent to agreeing to sex. Agreement implied by hidden conditions is no agreement at all.
Sorry, copyright only applies to expression, not to raw data, concepts or ideas. The copyright notice is meaningless unless you write a copyrightable item, and change your name to the contents of that item - say, a poem, a graphic symbol (perhaps that's why that one's been used), or a novel.
Actually, Canada's privacy commissioner does an extremely valuable job. The role involves being an advocate for the consumer, and developing fundamental privacy positions for the consumer. The commissioner advocates consumer privacy rights to corporations, trade groups, and to the government, and is frequently quoted internationally. The commissioner doesn't need to be elected, so the bribery concerns that surround elected officials aren't present, and as such the commissioner can be more effectively trusted not to be under undue influence from those with deep pockets who would seek to erode privacy.
Such a role is extremely valuable in modern democracies, where the choice at election time is frequently between two candidates who are in the pockets of the same corporations.