Incredible to think that only I thought of it. I guess everyone just raged in their blind MS hatred. And I find it hard to believe that testers were surfing with IE6 on external websites given by the Chinese fakers on Facebook. Either way, Google deserves equal blame as MS, if not more.
Ahh, lets attack the messenger instead of the message. Lets call anyone posting anything that can be construed as pro MS a paid shill and hound them out so that we can all revel in our circle jerk. Anything not conforming must go. No wonder many sane non-haters of MS have already left this place.
Something that bugged me throughout the whole China-Google-IE6 fiasco... Why were Google etc. using IE6 internally and got hacked? MS released IE7 with sandboxing in Vista and Windows 7... and Google's internal IT saved lots of money by sticking with IE6, but then turn around and blame MS for IE6 when MS itself recommends upgrading. Did I miss something or did Google PR and astroturfing successfully prevented this point from being made in any of the articles or Slashdot comments?
Atleast they have released the specs out to OSS developers and are working towards a accelerated solution. There used to be a time when only Nvidia cards used to run at full power on Linux. Go AMD!
WTF? Don't blame Firefox for the iPhone part. Does Opera run on the iPhone? no? Didn't think so. Apple bans competing applications.
Firefox would've never taken off like it did and Opera would be stillborn. It's shit like this that makes me hope that the iPad dies in a fire, though the software and hardware are kinda cool.
You can blame Apple for the iPhone part. Image if MS had banned competing apps. Firefox would've never taken off like it did. It's shit like this that makes me hope that the iPad dies in a fire, though the software and hardware are kinda cool.
There is no question in my mind that she's liable for damages, but those damages should be reasonable, at most a few thousand if you throw in the full punitive damages for someone that saw no economic benefit from the copying. It's simply insane for someone that did this for no profit to be hit with millions of dollars in penalties..
She was initially offered a few thousand dollars settlement and refused it so that she could go to court and lie under oath about replacing her hard disk in 2004 instead of 2005 among lots of other lies to weasel her way out. Her defense tried every trick in the book which drove up attorney costs for all concerned. After all this she claims that she's only liable for $24. And she's not dumb, she has a BS in Business Administration. I find it hard to feel pity for her.
Err... Sorry. Most P2P software are designed to give uploaders better download speeds. So it can be claimed that they're benefiting from sharing files.
Eg. Kazaa
In order to support the philosophy and principles upon which peer-to-peer technology is based, Kazaa Media Desktop now includes a Participation Level. This is a title or index assigned to each user based on the way in which they use the software. Basically, the more integrity rated files you share, the better your downloading performance will be. "
Bittorrent:
Choking and Optimistic Unchoking Choking is done for several reasons. TCP congestion control behaves very poorly when sending over many connections at once. Also, choking lets each peer use a tit-for-tat-ish algorithm to ensure that they get a consistent download rate. The choking algorithm described below is the currently deployed one. It is very important that all new algorithms work well both in a network consisting entirely of themselves and in a network consisting mostly of this one. There are several criteria a good choking algorithm should meet. It should cap the number of simultaneous uploads for good TCP performance. It should avoid choking and unchoking quickly, known as 'fibrillation'..It should reciprocate to peers who let it download..Finally, it should try out unused connections once in a while to find out if they might be better than the currently used ones, known as optimistic unchoking. The currently deployed choking algorithm avoids fibrillation by only changing choked peers once every ten seconds. Reciprocation and number of uploads capping is managed by unchoking the four peers which have the best upload rate and are interested This maximizes the client's download rate..These four peers are referred to as downloaders, because they are interested in downloading from the client. Peers which have a better upload rate (as compared to the downloaders) but aren't interested get unchoked. If they become interested, the downloader with the worst upload rate gets choked. If a client has a complete file, it uses its upload rate rather than its download rate to decide which peers to unchoke. For optimistic unchoking, at any one time there is a single peer which is unchoked regardless of its upload rate (if interested, it counts as one of the four allowed downloaders). Which peer is optimistically unchoked rotates every 30 seconds. Newly connected peers are three times as likely to start as the current optimistic unchoke as anywhere else in the rotation. This gives them a decent chance of getting a complete piece to upload.
Justice should be the outcome of rule by law, decent and upstanding law, not simply "rule by the loud".
She repeatedly lied under oath and willingly misrepresented facts to weasel her way out of the case. Juries don't take it kindly when you do that and hence slapped down the maximum fine permissible under law which the judge later reduced because it was excessive.
The RIAA first warned Thomas with a cease-and-desist letter and settlement offer.[when?] Thomas refused to settle, and was then sued on April 19, 2006, by several major record labels for copyright infringement. In the trial, the plaintiffs alleged that on February 21, 2005, Jammie Thomas shared a total of 1,702 tracks online. The plaintiffs, however, sought relief for only 24 of these.
Two weeks after MediaSentry noted the infringement of "tereastarr@KaZaA" (and notified the user via KaZaA instant message that he or she had been caught sharing files) back in February 2005, Thomas-Rasset hauled her Compaq Presario down to the local Best Buy. There was a problem with the hard drive, so Best Buy replaced it under warranty.
That might sound like no big deal until you realize that Thomas-Rasset later provided this new hard drive—and not the one in the machine during the alleged February infringement—to investigators and to her own expert witness. It becomes an even bigger deal when you realize that she swore under oath—twice—that she had replaced the hard drive in 2004 (a full year earlier) and that it had not been changed again since.
Next up was Eric Stanley, who had been hired by Thomas-Rasset before her first trial to examine the same hard drive that was turned over to recording industry investigators. Thomas-Rasset at first told Stanley that the drive had been replaced in 2004, well before the alleged infringement, so this evidence looked like it would be great for Thomas-Rasset... until recording industry lawyers deposed Stanley and Thomas-Rasset on the same day. At some point during that day, Stanley heard something that led him to examine the physical drive once more during a break. It was then he found the sticker with a manufacturing date—of early 2005.
Stanley realized he was looking at a drive that had likely not even been in the machine when the alleged infringement took place.
So she refused a settlement offer at the very beginning even before being represented by a lawyer, then repeatedly lied under oath to judge and jury(no wonder the damages were soooooo high, juries hate being blatantly lied to and want to teach such people a lesson) and now is still being...well... a dick. Imagine if the only punishment if you get caught stealing(stealing real goods, pedants please note) was to just pay up later, everyone would just steal then and pay up later if got caught. On top of that, the $1/song is for downloading the songs, not uploading which has a bigger punishment under law since the plaintiffs potentially lost revenue. I am sure this distinction will be lost on most of the posters here again who will repeatedly say the actual damages are just $24.
Anyway this was one of the worst cases that should have gone to court against the RIAA. They sued wrongly lots of times but this one case should've been settled long ago by Thomas, she knew she was in the wrong and tried to weasel her way out of it by lying.
More, if you want to read:
Why was Thomas-Rasset's password-protected computer running KaZaA in February 2005, and with the "tereastarr" name, if she had not set up the software? And since no one else ha
Are you the BadAnalogyGuy? If you hit and kill someone when running a red, you can go to jail and be liable for millions in a civil suit. Lookup " felony vehicular manslaughter charges".
Tivo is the kind of Linux user that Linux doesn't need. They use digital signing to deny users the right to run the modifications. They are precisely why Stallman had to come up with GPL v3 to prevent this kind of abuse of GPL v2.
WTF. I thought PJ was losing it these days by being a anti-MS zealot, but that incoherent rant takes the cake. I didn't really know what she was insinuating by going round and round till the end of the article. As if any company would just spending millions defending another company if it's own interests weren't at stake.
In short, the PR version is that Microsoft is defending AT&T as a Good Samaritan.The reality as I read this is the Microsoft is defending itself, because if AT&T loses, Microsoft faces having to pay yet another pile of bucks for having infringed someone's patent, just like what just happened to it in the i4i v. Microsoft patent case Microsoft lost and is appealing. That is what is at stake in this picture
But the Microsoft statements themselves that PJ quotes say the same damn thing.
D. Microsoft Has a Direct and Substantial Protectible Interest in Defending Its Customer. Since the filing of the Complaint, AT&T Inc. has contacted Microsoft and demanded that Microsoft indemnify AT&T Inc. against Plaintiff's claims in this case. [Quan Decl. Paragraph 2] AT&T subsidiaries distribute Microsoft's Mediaroom software to run on set-top boxes for U-verse. Microsoft cannot decline to intervene and defend against Plaintiffs' infringement claims aimed at such software without risking damage to Microsoft's relationship with AT&T, Inc. and its subsidiaries. In addition, Microsoft has other television and internet service provider customers. To the extent that Plaintiffs' infringement theories are directed at functionality provided by Mediaroom software, the claims in this case cast a potential cloud of uncertainty over Microsoft's relationships with other actual and potential customers. Microsoft's software and technology are implicated by Plaintiff's infringement allegations.
Groklaw(along with BoycottNovell.com) has become a anti MS witchhunt. They're no longer objective in any sense of the word. Too bad, I loved their SCO coverage.
It’s really simple. Safari on the Mac is easier to exploit. The things that Windows do to make it harder (for an exploit to work), Macs don’t do. Hacking into Macs is so much easier. You don’t have to jump through hoops and deal with all the anti-exploit mitigations you’d find in Windows.
It’s more about the operating system than the (target) program. Firefox on Mac is pretty easy too. The underlying OS doesn’t have anti-exploit stuff built into it.
With my Safari exploit, I put the code into a process and I know exactly where it’s going to be. There’s no randomization. I know when I jump there, the code is there and I can execute it there. On Windows, the code might show up but I don’t know where it is. Even if I get to the code, it’s not executable. Those are two hurdles that Macs don’t have.
It’s clear that all three browsers (Safari, IE and Firefox) have bugs. Code execution holes everywhere. But that’s only half the equation. The other half is exploiting it. There’s almost no hurdle to jump through on Mac OS X.
Typical foaming at the mouth anti-MS zealots, fail to read TFA and spreading FUD in knee jerk reactions.
It's Tivo that's the enemy of the new digital era.
It's Tivo that's suing willy nilly.
The latest legal salvo comes a few months after TiVo launched its own strike against AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), alleging that their video services illegally use its TV "time-warping" technology in their digital video recorders. AT&T's U-Verse TV service runs on Microsoft's Internet video technology.
TiVo hasn't been shy about using the courtroom to protect its intellectual property. The company also has a long-running dispute with Dish Networks Corp. ( DISH) and sister company Echostar Corp. (SATS) over the same DVR technology. The company has agreements with most of the cable companies and DirecTV Group Inc. ( DTV).
Slashdot Mirror
I have the Enterprise edition. This doesn't work to upgrade that. I purchased Windows 7 Ultimate.
Whose fault is that? And will you keep running it after June with no updates from MS?
Incredible to think that only I thought of it. I guess everyone just raged in their blind MS hatred. And I find it hard to believe that testers were surfing with IE6 on external websites given by the Chinese fakers on Facebook. Either way, Google deserves equal blame as MS, if not more.
Ahh, lets attack the messenger instead of the message. Lets call anyone posting anything that can be construed as pro MS a paid shill and hound them out so that we can all revel in our circle jerk. Anything not conforming must go. No wonder many sane non-haters of MS have already left this place.
They will stop supporting it after June 1st, so the point still stands.
It definitely won't after June 1st, if not earlier.
Something that bugged me throughout the whole China-Google-IE6 fiasco... Why were Google etc. using IE6 internally and got hacked? MS released IE7 with sandboxing in Vista and Windows 7... and Google's internal IT saved lots of money by sticking with IE6, but then turn around and blame MS for IE6 when MS itself recommends upgrading. Did I miss something or did Google PR and astroturfing successfully prevented this point from being made in any of the articles or Slashdot comments?
Atleast they have released the specs out to OSS developers and are working towards a accelerated solution. There used to be a time when only Nvidia cards used to run at full power on Linux. Go AMD!
WTF? Don't blame Firefox for the iPhone part. Does Opera run on the iPhone? no? Didn't think so. Apple bans competing applications.
Firefox would've never taken off like it did and Opera would be stillborn. It's shit like this that makes me hope that the iPad dies in a fire, though the software and hardware are kinda cool.
You can blame Apple for the iPhone part. Image if MS had banned competing apps. Firefox would've never taken off like it did. It's shit like this that makes me hope that the iPad dies in a fire, though the software and hardware are kinda cool.
The bigger question which I think everyone's missing is, why was Google using IE6 inhouse when it hacked???
There is no question in my mind that she's liable for damages, but those damages should be reasonable, at most a few thousand if you throw in the full punitive damages for someone that saw no economic benefit from the copying. It's simply insane for someone that did this for no profit to be hit with millions of dollars in penalties..
She was initially offered a few thousand dollars settlement and refused it so that she could go to court and lie under oath about replacing her hard disk in 2004 instead of 2005 among lots of other lies to weasel her way out. Her defense tried every trick in the book which drove up attorney costs for all concerned. After all this she claims that she's only liable for $24. And she's not dumb, she has a BS in Business Administration. I find it hard to feel pity for her.
Err... Sorry. Most P2P software are designed to give uploaders better download speeds. So it can be claimed that they're benefiting from sharing files.
Eg. Kazaa
In order to support the philosophy and principles upon which peer-to-peer technology is based, Kazaa Media Desktop now includes a Participation Level. This is a title or index assigned to each user based on the way in which they use the software. Basically, the more integrity rated files you share, the better your downloading performance will be. "
Bittorrent:
Choking and Optimistic Unchoking .It should reciprocate to peers who let it download. .Finally, it should try out unused connections once in a while to find out if they might be better than the currently used ones, known as optimistic unchoking. .These four peers are referred to as downloaders, because they are interested in downloading from the client.
Choking is done for several reasons. TCP congestion control behaves very poorly when sending over many connections at once. Also, choking lets each peer use a tit-for-tat-ish algorithm to ensure that they get a consistent download rate.
The choking algorithm described below is the currently deployed one. It is very important that all new algorithms work well both in a network consisting entirely of themselves and in a network consisting mostly of this one.
There are several criteria a good choking algorithm should meet. It should cap the number of simultaneous uploads for good TCP performance. It should avoid choking and unchoking quickly, known as 'fibrillation'.
The currently deployed choking algorithm avoids fibrillation by only changing choked peers once every ten seconds.
Reciprocation and number of uploads capping is managed by unchoking the four peers which have the best upload rate and are interested This maximizes the client's download rate.
Peers which have a better upload rate (as compared to the downloaders) but aren't interested get unchoked. If they become interested, the downloader with the worst upload rate gets choked. If a client has a complete file, it uses its upload rate rather than its download rate to decide which peers to unchoke.
For optimistic unchoking, at any one time there is a single peer which is unchoked regardless of its upload rate (if interested, it counts as one of the four allowed downloaders). Which peer is optimistically unchoked rotates every 30 seconds. Newly connected peers are three times as likely to start as the current optimistic unchoke as anywhere else in the rotation. This gives them a decent chance of getting a complete piece to upload.
Erm no.
From the Wiki:
Statutory damages are pre-established damages for cases where calculating a correct sum is deemed difficult. /quote.
I support her cause because they cannot prove any damages at all. Them downloading a song does not actually cause them any damage.
This is a civil case. Thus, a preponderance of evidence is all that's needed and not iron clad proof.
Justice should be the outcome of rule by law, decent and upstanding law, not simply "rule by the loud".
She repeatedly lied under oath and willingly misrepresented facts to weasel her way out of the case. Juries don't take it kindly when you do that and hence slapped down the maximum fine permissible under law which the judge later reduced because it was excessive.
Speeding is a criminal offense. Copyright infringement is a civil case and real and statutory damages must be taken into account.
True, she makes the RIAA guys look like the good folks.. and that's hard.
Now, “Here’s what I’m telling them,” says Jammie.
“You guys can settle this on my terms or take it to trial and try to prove the damages.
“You’re going to be lucky to prove more than $24 ”
I do not understand why Slashdot continues to support this woman.
Some background from the Wiki and http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/jammie-thomas-takes-the-stand-admits-to-major-misstep.ars
The RIAA first warned Thomas with a cease-and-desist letter and settlement offer.[when?] Thomas refused to settle, and was then sued on April 19, 2006, by several major record labels for copyright infringement.
In the trial, the plaintiffs alleged that on February 21, 2005, Jammie Thomas shared a total of 1,702 tracks online. The plaintiffs, however, sought relief for only 24 of these.
Two weeks after MediaSentry noted the infringement of "tereastarr@KaZaA" (and notified the user via KaZaA instant message that he or she had been caught sharing files) back in February 2005, Thomas-Rasset hauled her Compaq Presario down to the local Best Buy. There was a problem with the hard drive, so Best Buy replaced it under warranty.
That might sound like no big deal until you realize that Thomas-Rasset later provided this new hard drive—and not the one in the machine during the alleged February infringement—to investigators and to her own expert witness. It becomes an even bigger deal when you realize that she swore under oath—twice—that she had replaced the hard drive in 2004 (a full year earlier) and that it had not been changed again since.
Next up was Eric Stanley, who had been hired by Thomas-Rasset before her first trial to examine the same hard drive that was turned over to recording industry investigators. Thomas-Rasset at first told Stanley that the drive had been replaced in 2004, well before the alleged infringement, so this evidence looked like it would be great for Thomas-Rasset... until recording industry lawyers deposed Stanley and Thomas-Rasset on the same day. At some point during that day, Stanley heard something that led him to examine the physical drive once more during a break. It was then he found the sticker with a manufacturing date—of early 2005.
Stanley realized he was looking at a drive that had likely not even been in the machine when the alleged infringement took place.
So she refused a settlement offer at the very beginning even before being represented by a lawyer, then repeatedly lied under oath to judge and jury(no wonder the damages were soooooo high, juries hate being blatantly lied to and want to teach such people a lesson) and now is still being...well... a dick. Imagine if the only punishment if you get caught stealing(stealing real goods, pedants please note) was to just pay up later, everyone would just steal then and pay up later if got caught. On top of that, the $1/song is for downloading the songs, not uploading which has a bigger punishment under law since the plaintiffs potentially lost revenue. I am sure this distinction will be lost on most of the posters here again who will repeatedly say the actual damages are just $24.
Anyway this was one of the worst cases that should have gone to court against the RIAA. They sued wrongly lots of times but this one case should've been settled long ago by Thomas, she knew she was in the wrong and tried to weasel her way out of it by lying.
More, if you want to read:
Why was Thomas-Rasset's password-protected computer running KaZaA in February 2005, and with the "tereastarr" name, if she had not set up the software? And since no one else ha
Are you the BadAnalogyGuy? If you hit and kill someone when running a red, you can go to jail and be liable for millions in a civil suit. Lookup " felony vehicular manslaughter charges".
I bet it's serverside and not easily circumvented like that.
Well, there's a nice $18 to $20 kickback that AT&T provides to Apple garnished from your monthly iPhone bill.
Tivo is the kind of Linux user that Linux doesn't need. They use digital signing to deny users the right to run the modifications. They are precisely why Stallman had to come up with GPL v3 to prevent this kind of abuse of GPL v2.
WTF. I thought PJ was losing it these days by being a anti-MS zealot, but that incoherent rant takes the cake. I didn't really know what she was insinuating by going round and round till the end of the article. As if any company would just spending millions defending another company if it's own interests weren't at stake.
In short, the PR version is that Microsoft is defending AT&T as a Good Samaritan.The reality as I read this is the Microsoft is defending itself, because if AT&T loses, Microsoft faces having to pay yet another pile of bucks for having infringed someone's patent, just like what just happened to it in the i4i v. Microsoft patent case Microsoft lost and is appealing. That is what is at stake in this picture
But the Microsoft statements themselves that PJ quotes say the same damn thing.
D. Microsoft Has a Direct and Substantial Protectible Interest in Defending Its Customer.
Since the filing of the Complaint, AT&T Inc. has contacted Microsoft and demanded that Microsoft indemnify AT&T Inc. against Plaintiff's claims in this case. [Quan Decl. Paragraph 2] AT&T subsidiaries distribute Microsoft's Mediaroom software to run on set-top boxes for U-verse. Microsoft cannot decline to intervene and defend against Plaintiffs' infringement claims aimed at such software without risking damage to Microsoft's relationship with AT&T, Inc. and its subsidiaries. In addition, Microsoft has other television and internet service provider customers. To the extent that Plaintiffs' infringement theories are directed at functionality provided by Mediaroom software, the claims in this case cast a potential cloud of uncertainty over Microsoft's relationships with other actual and potential customers.
Microsoft's software and technology are implicated by Plaintiff's infringement allegations.
Groklaw(along with BoycottNovell.com) has become a anti MS witchhunt. They're no longer objective in any sense of the word. Too bad, I loved their SCO coverage.
Why not just hear it from the horse's mouth?
From http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2941
Why Safari? Why didn’t you go after IE or Safari?
It’s really simple. Safari on the Mac is easier to exploit. The things that Windows do to make it harder (for an exploit to work), Macs don’t do. Hacking into Macs is so much easier. You don’t have to jump through hoops and deal with all the anti-exploit mitigations you’d find in Windows.
It’s more about the operating system than the (target) program. Firefox on Mac is pretty easy too. The underlying OS doesn’t have anti-exploit stuff built into it.
With my Safari exploit, I put the code into a process and I know exactly where it’s going to be. There’s no randomization. I know when I jump there, the code is there and I can execute it there. On Windows, the code might show up but I don’t know where it is. Even if I get to the code, it’s not executable. Those are two hurdles that Macs don’t have.
It’s clear that all three browsers (Safari, IE and Firefox) have bugs. Code execution holes everywhere. But that’s only half the equation. The other half is exploiting it. There’s almost no hurdle to jump through on Mac OS X.
Shhhh, we're hunting Ballmer's rabbits. Be quiet and don't be a party pooper by injecting truthful facts into the bashing.
Typical foaming at the mouth anti-MS zealots, fail to read TFA and spreading FUD in knee jerk reactions.
It's Tivo that's the enemy of the new digital era.
It's Tivo that's suing willy nilly.
The latest legal salvo comes a few months after TiVo launched its own strike against AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), alleging that their video services illegally use its TV "time-warping" technology in their digital video recorders. AT&T's U-Verse TV service runs on Microsoft's Internet video technology.
TiVo hasn't been shy about using the courtroom to protect its intellectual property. The company also has a long-running dispute with Dish Networks Corp. ( DISH) and sister company Echostar Corp. (SATS) over the same DVR technology. The company has agreements with most of the cable companies and DirecTV Group Inc. ( DTV).